A new partnership between Booking.com, Amadeus and Conferma Pay will mean that business travellers can now book 80 per cent of the properties on the hotel booking platform and invoice their employer or TMC instead of paying for the room on their own card.
The deal will mean billback can now be used for bookings at more than 800,000 properties through Amadeus cytric Travel & Expense for corporates, Amadeus Selling Platform Connect for travel management companies and Amadeus Web Services for online travel agencies.?
When the booking is made, Conferma Pay automatically generates a virtual card number, which Booking.com then sends on to the property. At checkout, the property charges the booking to the virtual card, and the booking and payment data is reconciled.?
¡°The addition of Booking.com content in Amadeus Hotel Billback powered by Conferma Pay gives TMCs and their corporate customers a new opportunity to use virtual payment for all their hotel reservations. Both the traveller and the agent can benefit from automated reconciliation, minimise the risk of fraud, and experience a simple, secure, frictionless process from purchase to payment¡± said Kelly Cleeton, director, global business development at Conferma Pay.
¡°Thanks to these upgrades between Amadeus, Booking.com and Conferma, travel agents will be able to offer hotel billback as an additional advantage that travellers can receive when choosing Booking.com properties. It will allow agents to quickly reconcile any bookings they have paid on behalf of clients, and reduce the manual effort involved in booking and paying for hotels on behalf of corporate customers,¡± said Katja Bohnet, Amadeus¡¯ director of hotel distribution, hospitality.
Conferma launched a virtual payment platform with Visa in November.