Hotel Payment Processing Series: What You Need to Know About the October 2023 Visa Network Fee Updates

This October, Visa is issuing another round of 2023 updates to their network fees (you may remember these updates from May). As a payment vendor, it’s our role to make sure hoteliers understand the updates that are relevant to you – and help you ignore what isn’t.

What’s Coming

Starting October 1, Visa is introducing a new Secure Credential Integrity fee that applies to authorizations that aren’t authenticated either via network tokenization or 3-D Secure (3DS).

The fee is applicable to all domestic and intraregional transactions acquired in Europe, except for France, who’ll be included in October 2024, as well as Turkey. The scope of the fee includes non-European Union countries, including the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

What It Means

Visa is once again raising prices on key-entered transactions, essentially anything that doesn’t go through 3DS. While we won’t know how much the increase is until October, it’s typically small – likely, no more than .05%, though for European rates that’s a decent increase.

More importantly, this reinforces an overall 3DS trend we’ve been seeing. To increase payment security, Visa continues to use pricing increases to discourage card-on-file transactions and encourage online, 3DS verified transactions.

While 3DS isn’t mandated for U.S. merchants, there are in fact a lot of benefits to using it, particularly reducing fraud and saving on chargebacks. Check out our 3DS guide for a deep dive.

However, 3DS isn’t possible unless you’re capturing online payments – and unfortunately, many hotels are still capturing event and group sales payments by key-entering information for a card on file. The truth is, this is an inefficient, insecure, and much more costly way to handle card-not-present. Plus, it can ultimately keep you from getting paid.

To learn more about your risks and opportunities, check out this post. Our team is also happy to give you a free consultation to determine ways to reduce costs and increase security.