PARIS, FRANCE - In most e-commerce business today, payment is done at the time of purchase and not at the time of consumption. Over the recent years the usual pattern has become "Select/Book >Pay >Get".
But in the hotel sector, the prevailing practice remains: "Book > Get > Pay"
Today, this practice constitutes one of the main impediments to revenue growth for hoteliers due to its negative effects:
- High cancellation rate: According to a recent research by D-EDGE, over 23.5% of the bookings of independent hotels and 35% on-the-books revenue is cancelled before arrival.
- Fraudulent Bookings: As the booking is not engaging the end user, some hotels may be the victim of unscrupulous visitors booking long-term stays (20 days or more) just to feed their Visa's demands for example.
- Cash flow impact: According to the recent D-EDGE's survey, average booking time (lead time) on hotels' brand website is 37 days ... 37 days of missed cash flow.
To cope with these issues, hoteliers should enable and encourage payment at time of booking and should widened the form of payment accepted. It is also a response to a growing demand from the end travellers: 59%* of them will book somewhere again if they are able to pay quickly the first time.
With this in mind, D-EDGE and PayPal have partnered to enable hoteliers to accept payments quickly on their hotel website, from almost anywhere around the world, in a secure manner.
This partnership also enables hoteliers who do not have a PayPal account to create theirs in a few minutes and manage it directly from their D-EDGE platform. The account creation process is very fast and hoteliers can then start accepting payment instantly on their booking engine from almost anywhere around the world.
Pierre-Charles Grob, CEO of D-EGDE said "Thanks to this partnership, the 11,000 hoteliers whose websites are powered by a Booking Engine D-EDGE ( ex Availpro Fastbooking) can in a very easy way get access to the 267 million active PayPal users around the world and offer them a simple way to pay in a few clicks at the time of booking from any device including mobile phones." The return on experience shows that the conversion rate can increase up to 87.5%** thanks to PayPal solution for mobile.
"Thanks to this partnership with D-EDGE, we offer an additional choice of payment to our users and hoteliers. We respond to a strong expectation of our customers: we offer them an easy, fast and secure payment at the time of booking" added Damien Perillat, General Manager PayPal, Southern Europe.
* Source: Google/Ipsos, August 2016.
**Source: PayPal -comScore, 4th Quarter 2015.
Tags:D-EDGE
