Is saving credit card data for a set period of time in the plans? It would be extremely beneficial to have this info and be able to re-charge a card up to 3 days after the booking date. I know there are security requirements but I believe checkfront already meets those?
Anyway, my reasons:
Making changes or additions to a reservation - this happens all the time and refunds are easy enough (when the refund system works) but adding additional items requires the added step of getting people to pay...again. Most customers expect that we already have their information after they gave it to us the first time so we should just be able to do it. Not a big deal, but it would make life a little easier.
Collecting fees for damages/unreturned equipment - this is the big one and why a 3 day time limit would be okay. Having this information would allow us to easily collect fees that might be incurred over the course of the booking but are nearly impossible to collect after the fact. Customers (admittedly the worst ones) have already done their trip and have no reason to give us their credit card information to pay for broken equipment or keeping equipment beyond the time limit. It's rare that this happens (maybe 2%) but would be extremely helpful when you're faced with losing a couple hundred dollars.
Thanks - we realize the need for a solution here. Checkfront is level 1 PCI DSS compliant (see http://www.checkfront.com/pci/). This however does not allow us to store credit card numbers on site, only transmit them.
Storing credit card numbers with your account requires a different level of PCI compliance and certification is very costly dependant on the total number of cards we store. Although our eventual goal is to reach this level of certification, we'd be unable to do so currently without a large increase to subscription rates.
We are currently looking into integration options with our payment gateways as a preferred route. Authorize.net for instance has an extra service called CMI that allows you to rebill a customers card without re-authorization or knowing the credit card number ( http://developer.authorize.net/api/cim/ ). Paypal also has a similar service, although documentation is scarse.
Keep an eye on the forums for news on this. If anyone is using Authorize.net and are interesting in using CMI with Checkfront, please drop us a note or chime in here. Other gateways should follow.
As an Authoirze.net user - CMI sounds like it would do the trick, I'll keep an eye out.
Degard007 - For the rarity that we have to use it, I'd prefer not to inconvenience the many because of a few (we already require full payment to make the reservation and adding a few hundred dollars would not be a trivial addition). Besides that, we're still having issues with refunds going through. Trying to ensure they work on every single reservation instead of 10% sounds like a pain. Thanks for the suggestion though!
