This questions often comes from hotels who have a credit card integration with Adyen or Stripe. You can recognize whether a booking has a valid credit card by the icon of the card next to the guest name in the booking. If there is no icon, that means we do not have a valid credit card on file.

  • Booking Engine: if a booking comes in from the booking engine, and the credit card is not valid, we will accept it in Mews. This means there will be additional work for reservations to chase the customer for a valid credit card. Why? Because if the customer is not allowed to book on your website, they will do so via Booking.com or Expedia and you pay 15-20% commission on it. So its still better to have some manual work, as the final cost for the hotel is still better. In order to ask the guest for their credit card, the easiest is to resend the confirmation e-mail, and ask the guest to check-in online, submitting a new credit card in the process.
  • Channel Manager: if we receive bookings from the Channel Manager with cards that are not valid, we also accept them. Traditionally, those bookings would also come through to the hotel, it just requires a manual check of each individual card to verify its invalid. We help do this check for you. So if there is no card on a booking, that should have one, you know that we already checked the card details and tried to take a 1 Euro pre-authorization, and it failed. This automatic check helps the hotel to save a lot of time. Once you spot an invalid credit card, you need to either follow up with the guest direct, or with the Travel Agent to either get a new card, or to cancel the booking. We cannot decline the booking automatically, as the customer booked via a third party, and they are responsible to chase a correct payment type, not Mews.