Virtual Terminal

With VikBooking it is possible to charge credit cards for your reservations directly from your own website admin section thanks to the admin-widget Virtual Terminal. This feature is particularly useful for those who use our E4jConnect Channel Manager with channels like Booking.com, Expedia, Vrbo etc.. to receive credit card details for their guests. No matter if these are Virtual Credit Cards or pre-authorized cards, the admin-widget Virtual Terminal in VikBooking will be able to handle them.

However, there are some requirements to match in order to be able to to use this feature:

1. Your website must be using one of our payment plugins that supports "direct-charge" transactions. At the moment, only Stripe does it.
2. You need to request the activation of these API features for your merchant account directly to the bank (Stripe), because by default they cannot be used on regular merchant accounts.
3. The admin-widget Virtual Terminal will only work if rendered within a booking details page on the admin section of your website. Trying to access this widget on any other page of your website will not work.
4. The reservation must be assigned to a payment method capable of supporting direct-charge transactions, hence Stripe must be assigned to your reservation if you would like to start a credit card transaction.

Here's a screen shot that shows the interface of the new admin-widget Virtual Terminal. As you can see, this widget was displayed through the Multitask Panel (the "apps" icon in the top-right section of the menu) and it will only work on a booking details page.

How to enable this feature?

Your Stripe merchant account must be enabled to support either one or two "advanced" API features depending on the channels from which your Vik Channel Manager collects credit card details. You will have to reach out to Stripe to request the activation of the advanced API features required by your business.

These are the two advanced API features available with Stripe that you may need to have activated in order to be able to use the Virtual Terminal in VikBooking correctly:

1. Raw Card Data APIs: this feature should be enabled on your Stripe merchant account in order to be able to handle transactions with raw card numbers directly from your PMS software (VikBooking).
2. 3D Secure Import: this feature for importing 3D Secure Results should be enabled on your Stripe merchant account if your Channel Manager is connected with the channel Vrbo (Expedia Group). This is because the Vrbo reservations will contain tokens and values to import a previous 3D Secure authentication to ensure the correct processing of the credit card transaction through Stripe. If your Vik Channel Manager is not connected with Vrbo, then you don't need this API feature to be enabled.

How to request the activation of the above API feature(s) for your Stripe merchant account?

Get in touch with Stripe and provide them the following information for your business to help them identify your request as well as your Channel Manager software (please adjust what's needed):

Our business is in the travel industry and gets card 3DS tokens from Expedia or VRBO. We would like to request the activation of the "3D Secure Import" feature for this merchant account (specify your account details). We are working with a third-party platform which is requesting that we enable this feature on our Stripe account in order to be able to process Virtual Credit Cards received from Booking.com, Expedia, VRBO etc.. The name of the third-party platform we use (PMS + Channel Manager software for hotels) is "E4jConnect - VikBooking by E4J srl", and they are a PCI-DSS Compliant software provider company.

This should help the Stripe support team understand your request, identify our software and complete the activation.

Once the requested API features have been enabled by Stripe for your merchant account, you will able to start using the Virtual Terminal widget in VikBooking to process payments manually.

How to schedule automatic payment collections? 

In the Administration > Credit Card tab of a reservation, you can schedule the collection of payments by selecting or creating an amount and by specifying a date and time for the automatic collection. This is a very useful function implemented with the new version 1.7.0 of VikBooking exclusively for OTAs like Booking.com that provides you with the VCC details from where you should collect money. In this way, it can be programmed as you prefer and you won't lose much time in administrative tasks. 
The automatic payment collection will be made through the Virtual Terminal.
Clicking on this button, you will be able to create a new payment collection, but also see the one already created and its result. In fact, if the charge hasn't returned a successful response, there will be a warning symbol, and by clicking on that payment, it will open a window with the error message. 
Moreover, if you open the Virtual Terminal widget from this page, the fields will be automatically filled in with the credit card information, and so you should simply click on the "Charge Credit Card" button to collect money.