Ascent Newschargebacks : Prevention And Risk Reduction
2020 brought challenges for most businesses, not the least of which was cancellations of service and disputes at a higher level than ever before. Ascent clients are set up as Merchant of Record and therefore receive notification of and documentation about any chargebacks they receive directly from their acquiring bank.
AscentZeroCost
Reduce your credit processing fees to almost zero.
AscentZeroCost allows our clients to pass along most of their processing fees to the consumer. Find out if this fully-compliant solution is right for you.
AscentPay
Provide more convenience and payment flexibility to your guests with AscentPay.
This solution allows rental managers to be paid in full at booking, with zero chargeback or fraud liability, while your guests can opt to pay off their vacation in 12 easy and affordable payments.
-Michael McFarlane // Shadow Mountain Resort
We switched to Ascent Processing over 3 years ago and could not be happier with our decision. Our transition to Ascent was effortless, as the responsive and highly knowledgeable staff handled it all! We are extremely pleased with the easy-to-use software and client portal. We are absolutely satisfied with Ascent Processing and highly recommend their services.
-Michelle Sexton // Paradise Properties Vacation Rentals & Sales
Most of all, when there is the occasional issue, Ascent answers their phone and emails and every single time works with us and our clients to find a solution.
What Does Ascent Provide Through Avantio
Through Avantio Payments Ascent is able to provide credit and debit card processing with net billing:
- Training for your team on how to lower your processing fees.
- Free documentation review, real-time reporting and net billing.
- No application fee, no set-up or termination fees, no contract length.
- Monthly monitoring to ensure your cards are qualifying at the lowest rates.
Setting Up Vacation Rent Payment
Vacation Rent Payment is an online payment solution specifically tailored to the needs of the vacation rental industry. By delivering the convenience of electronic payments for vacation rentals, Vacation Rent Payment has become a go-to payment solution for property managers, owners, and their guests.
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See Whats Popular In Your Region
Depending on your location, you might want to consider what options work best for your property. Especially with the rise of domestic travelers, its important to follow the payment norms of your propertys locality.
Are you guests paying for vacation rentals through PayPal or bank transfer? At the property or in advance? Exploring the popular trends for your vacation rental will not only tell you what your guests prefer but also save you money in fees by only connecting with payment methods popular in your area.
You might find that some regions use certain services while others do not. This is especially important to bear in mind when buying or managing a property abroad or even in just a different region. For example, different money transfer apps have varying popularity depending on the location. Venmo might be widely used in some areas, but Bizum might be the preferred method for other locations.
Fees and services add up, so make sure youre only implementing payment methods that make sense in your locality. Do the research and find what works best for your business.
How To Lower Your Reserve And Reduce The Collateral Held On Your Merchant Account
Today we’re going to talk about future delivery risk, which is something that is a real challenge for travel merchants, accommodation based merchants, any type of merchant with subscriptions and basically anybody that takes payment today for a service that they’ll provide in the future.
If you’ve ever have had a problem with a payment processor where they have frozen your account, or they’ve given you a conditional approval of your merchant account where they hold your money – if you’ve ever been in this situation it’s likely because you are a future delivery based merchant.
In order for me to explain what future delivery is I must first explain the chargeback rules. Visa and MasterCard have a policy: when a cardholder pays for something with a credit card they’re guaranteed to get it. It’s one of the core principle protections of credit card processing. That having been said…what happens if somebody pays for something on the credit card but they don’t get? If a cardholder does not get what they paid for, for any reason, they get their money back.
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What Causes People To Rent Out Vacation Properties
There can be many reasons behind why people have to rent properties in cities where they dont intend to stay permanently. In most cases, they are there with their families to spend their vacations. At other times it is a business executive on a business trip. And sometimes a family has to relocate only temporary for a contractual job. Based on their trip duration, budget and nature of the trip they can choose different types of rental properties. When you decide to rent out your property as a vacation rental property, here are property options you will be competing with:
- Rental Homes
Stick To The 30 Days Out Rule
It is not necessarily a rule as it is an entirely practical direction to stay on. Ensure that you charge and receive final payment at least 30 days before their arrival. The truth of the matter is that you do not know when a traveler is fibbing when they say that they prefer to pay you when they get paid in a week if they dont pay, you just blocked every other lead to rent that property for those dates for someone who could end up being a problem later. If they cant afford it at the planning stage, they likely shouldnt rent the property. Situations at home could cost them unexpectedly, and when it is time for your final payment, they cancel last minute and that entire time that you and your team spent having the unit reserved was for nothing. It could end up costing you big time if you cant re-book the unit at similar rates and hurt quite a bit if you lose a property over the deal because an owner gets upset. Create the rules and timelines and look at it as a filter to weed out potential problems with guests who cant pay on your schedule. Dont bend on payment terms to get more guests. It will not end well. If you need more guests, you need better marketing or better inventory.
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Communicate With Your Guests
The best thing you can do is go straight to the source. Asking your clients directly what payment method they prefer guarantees that youre making the right decisions for your property. You could include this in the guest satisfaction survey or mention your flexibility on payment in the property description.
Just make sure that you are actually open to different payment methods before reaching out to guests. If you ask customers their preferred payment method, but you dont plan to expand beyond credit card payments, for example, you might risk hurting the guest experience rather than improving it.
What Is The Definition Of Future Delivery Risk
Future delivery risk is not just related to travel businesses. It applies to all businesses that fulfill their promise to their customers in the future. It can be subscriptions that grant access to an online portal for a period of time. It can be something as simple as an annual newspaper subscription.
Future delivery risk is the liability incurred by a payment processor when a payment is taken today, for a service that won’t be provided until a future date.
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How Can I Accept Payments On My Website
Lodgifys booking system fully integrates with the most competitive gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Paypal, Authorize.net, and Payyo, regardless of if youre using it through our website or just have the booking widget embedded into a third-party site.
If you are a Lodgify user, you will need to configure the forms of payment you want to accept on your site before you can start taking credit card payments.
In the Settings section of your account, you can activate credit card payments using Stripe and/or PayPal. If you use the Stripe connection, you also have the option to decide your Payment Scheduling settings. In other words, youre able to split up the booking amounts into smaller payments, rather than charging 100% at the time of booking. This can be configured in your Policies.
The steps above are specific to members with a Lodgify built website. All other website hosts will have a different process with embedding. The sound of an embeddable custom code might sound scary, but its quite easy. Well walk you through it!
How To Accept Payments On WordPress
If you dont use a Lodgify domain but instead have a website through WordPress, youll need to embed or install a booking widget plugin to be able to take online reservations and payments.
With Lodgify, the code you will use for your website is automatically created for you, so all you have to do is go to your Lodgify account and select the widget thats best for you and your clients. This will enable guests to search availability for their chosen dates, enter their contact details and pay securely on your website.
If you already have a particular theme picked out for your webpage, no worries. Lodgifys booking widgets are customizable to where they can seamlessly plug into your website without any disruption to your design.
WordPress will give you options for the spaces you want to embed your Lodgify booking widget. If you own more than one vacation rental property, dont forget that your widget should be added to each property page!
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How Do Auto Payments Work
Guesty is all about automating your property management tasks, including payment processing. Our Auto Payments feature allows you to automate the collection of vacation rental payments from your guests. You can create distinct rules for each listing that specify when payments should be processed and what percentage of the total payout to collect at each point.
For example, you can opt for 100% of the fee to be processed upon booking confirmation or 50% to be processed upon confirmation and the rest to be processed upon check in.
I Need An Example What Is A Future Delivery Scenario
Think about a large chain of hotels. A chain of hotels might be taking payments for reservations that are fairly far in the future where people tend to plan their vacation well in advance. What would happen if that chain of hotels went out of business? The card holders who paid for their room are not going to be able to say, so they will get their money back. That’s the general rule that Visa and Mastercard have in place.
More specifically, what will happen is the cardholder will be entitled to do a chargeback. The money will have to go back to the cardholder, but in this example the chain of hotels are out of business. They filed for bankruptcy, and don’t have the money to pay it back. If that’s the case then where do the funds come from? A lot of merchants don’t realize this but it comes from the payment processor. .
The chargeback rules mean that a payment processor can be at quite significant financial risk. Think of a big national hotel chain. If a large chain of hotels went out of business, that could potentially be a lot of money in refunds for hotel rooms, for guests that can’t be accommodated. If the company was big enough that could represent millions or tens of millions of dollars for services that are undelivered. The payment processor can have tremendous losses because of this. That is why even large companies often have reserves if they do a lot of future delivery type business.
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Vacation Rental By Owner
One of the ways to increase rental profit is to put your property on rent yourself. Many services can provide you the services of renting out your property, but there are pros and cons with managing the rental yourself vs. using a property management company. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of renting out your property without a middle party.
- You make your own decisions.
- You manage each and every aspect about your property and remain in complete control.
- The rating of a company acting as the middleman does not affect your rating.
- You have better control of your earnings.
However, doing so has its disadvantages as well.
- You might not price your house right.
- You might not have the right tools to manage a vacation property.
- You dont have a big market reach and exposure.
Working with regional Travel Agency is also a great way to reduce the marketing cost and get more renter to find you offline.
Ascent Payment Processor Provider And Avantio Unite To Offer Property Managers A Full Solution For Their Vacation Rental Payments
We know that running a vacation rental agency has a lot of different areas that you need to tackle on a daily basis, but payment processing is one of the most complex of them all.
After all money is always a delicate matter for all parties involved.
That is why Avantio has an additional payment processor provider that you can choose so you can automate all your charges, deposits, and refunds.
But lets get to know Ascent a little more
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How To Increase Your Rental Property Profit
Here are some ways you can increase the profit that comes from your rental property.
- Ask for a security deposit.
- Rent out the property for mid to long durations despite the fact that people are looking for a daily short term vacation rental. The guest traffic is not always going to be high.
- Paint your property, so it looks new.
- Offer a variety of payment acceptance options.
You dont want to reject a potential guest only because you could not accept a payment using their preferred method, such as credit cards or ACH | eCheck.
The Moneck Payment Solutions For Vacation Rental
When you want to profit from a vacation rental property business, you will have to find a way to accept payments. Due to the high-risk nature of the business, banks are likely to reject your application for a merchant account. On the other hand, Moneck Payment Solutions offers credit card and ACH check payment solutions for your industry that will always help you start, maintain and grow your business despite its high-risk nature. Here are some of the benefits Moneck Payment Solutions offers for a vacation rental merchant account.
- We have a high approval rate.
- We can get low, medium and high-risk merchants approved.
- We allow you to accept payments from all major credit cards.
- You can get approved despite low or poor credit score.
- You can process recurring payments with our account.
- You can also accept mobile payments.
And to give you the peace of mind you deserve, we have our customer support lines opened Monday through Friday. Get in touch with us right now at .
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Important Payment Processing Rules For Vacation Rentals
Its no secret that to keep a business running, the company has to make sure theyre making money. It is not a simple task for vacation rental managers to maintain payment schedules, cancellations, future payments due, deposits, and declined or charged back cards or who wants a refund. A job like this requires constant organization and a structured plan. Here are 4 important payment processing rules for vacation rentals to follow to ensure that your payment systems run smoothly:
How To Take Credit Card Payments For Your Vacation Rental
So, you figure that it would be good to accept credit cards from your guests for payments and are thinking of applying for a merchant account. Excellent – life will be simpler for you and the guests!
Have you thought about how you would actually take the credit card information for a payment? It’s not always obvious what options you have and how that may affect what you need to do. Note that there is no requirement that you have a physical machine to process credit cards – you can process payments online instead with a Virtual Terminal.
There are a few payment scenarios that may apply to you – take a look at the requirements and consequences of each below.
NOTE: There are strict requirements on the handling and storing of Credit Card information that all agree to in their merchant account agreements. If you keep paper or electronic copies of any important information then you have obligations to ensure that the information cannot be stolen.
i) Swipe their credit card
This method would require a “Physical Terminal” and the credit card to be present. This is not a common scenario in our industry as so many owners are not on-site but for those that are:
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Vacation Home Rental Credit Card Processing Merchant Account
In the past few years more and more people began owning private vacation homes and rent those out daily, weekly and monthly to tourists. One of the most major problems vacation home owners are facing is the ability to process credit cards as a form of payment for the rentals. MagicPay provides payment processing solutions to hotels, motels, resorts and vacation homes.
How Will I Be Able to Process Payments?
Once approved for your vacation home rental credit card processing account, you will be granted access to our online and mobile payment gateway which will allow you to process credit card transactions online on our virtual terminal or on your website using our simple API integration feature. Also, in case you would like to have a retail POS, you may use our mobile app to process payments on Android or Apple devices.
Our online payment gateway is a smart tool for accepting payments and has multiple features that will guarantee maximum security and prevent fraud on your merchant account.
What other tools would be useful for my vacation home?
Customer Vault This powerful feature allows you to store credit card information of your clients and that way be able to charge their card for extra services. This feature could be used in order to charge extra items the guests has ordered to their rooms or vacation home.
Email Invoicing This feature would allow you to send invoices to the guests and bill them for a specific amount. Saving you time on the checkout and sale process.