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Hotels are losing up to £18,000 for every £1m in corporate transactions, due to a fear of overcharging on surcharge fees and a lack of understanding of the regulations, new data has revealed.
This is according to research from global payments marketplace firm Apexx, which said legislation and pan-European regulation which banned surcharge fees on consumer cards did not apply to corporate and non-EU cards.
The firm said those in the airline and hotel sectors “risk breaching EU law and facing heavy fines”, as well as “possible regulatory action” if they overcharge their customers on a per transaction basis.
The firm’s analysis of over 3.5 million corporate transactions found that hotels could recoup, on average, 1.77% of total transaction value. But the permissible surcharge amount varies for each transaction based on a multitude of factors such as card type, cardholder country of origin, as well as interchange and acquirer fees.
According to the firm, hotels don’t have access to the technology or vast data resources required to calculate these values in real time. As a result, fear of breaching EU law means that many are not surcharging at all and throwing away the equivalent of £17,700 for every £1m in corporate revenue.
Those that do surcharge, are only surcharging a nominal amount, ultimately failing to recover the full amount permissible or are surcharging too much in breach of the applicable regulations.
Peter Keenan, CEO of Apexx, said: “The sheer difficulty of calculating this dynamic value coupled with the threat of breaching EU law means many merchants are dissuaded from surcharging at all, leaving millions on the table.
“Some opt for ‘quick and dirty’ solutions such as charging a static rate of 1% on every transaction. But this still means merchants lose vast sums of money as the value will always have to be conservatively pitched under, while every transaction that comes in below the 1% will need the surcharge cost omitted completely. Either way, the merchants lose.”
