Credit Card Services for Cruise Lines

Managers of cruise line businesses need to follow credit card services procedures that are somewhat different from these required of most other cad acceptors that take credit cards in retail stores or other traditional types of settings.

In this short post I will examine the best practices that you should implement each time you accept a card payment to help you achieve the lowest possible processing rates:

1. Get an authorization approval for any on-board charges that were not originally authorized. To obtain an additional transaction authorization approval from the card issuer for the amount that your customer has incurred on board of the cruise liner:
   
   1. Implement regular authorization procedures to get an approval for the additional amount.
   2. If your authorization request is declined by the issuer, do not push the payment through, but instead ask your customer for another method of payment.
2. If the additional authorization request was not approved, only submit for settlement the amount that is already approved. The following best practices for transaction settlement will help you minimize customer dispute and chargeback rates, which will lower your processing costs and potential losses from declined authorizations. In particular, you will need to:
   
   1. Only settle the approved authorization amount, leaving out any of the on-board charges, for which authorization from the issuer has not received.
   2. Ask your customer that he provides a different form of payment for the rejected additional amount.
3. If the amount of the initially approved authorization is bigger than the real final cost of the service, submit an authorization reversal for the overcharge. To finalize the settlement and to ensure that you do not overcharge your customer, you will have to issue an authorization reversal for the excessive amount.
4. How to use the final authorization and the 15% rules. At the check-out at the end of the cruise, transaction authorization is only needed in the following instances:
   
   1. If, for one reason or other, you did not obtain an authorization approval at the beginning. If that is the case, authorize the whole transaction amount.
   2. You did get an authorization approval initially, but the final amount is bigger than the initially authorized amount. It is here that you will need to use the 15% rule to see if you need to request an additional authorization approval. Here is a step-by-step guide on how this is to be done:
      
      1. Begin by adding 15% to the initially authorized amount.
      2. Compare the sum you received above to the final transaction amount.
      3. If the final transaction amount is bigger than the sum you received, you will have to request an authorization approval for the difference.
5. Disclose and obtain acceptance of all terms and conditions of the sale. It is really critical that visitors to your website fully understand the terms and conditions of the sale, prior to placing an order. In particular, these details will have to be disclosed:
   
   1. The total sale's amount, with all booking fees and other charges.
   2. How these additional charges will be posted on your customer's monthly card statement.
   3. When and how these charges will be applied.
   
   
   Now that you have disclosed your terms and conditions, you need to get the consumer to agree to them, before taking her to the checkout to complete the transaction.