MasterCard (NYSE: MA) announced today that Hana Tour, Korea's largest travel agency, will offer its MasterCard Purchase Control solution to enhance overseas payment services through virtual card numbers. Utilizing the industry-leading platform, Hana Tour will issue a virtual card number for each individual hotel booking, securing the efficient management of every step of the reservation process, from booking to clearance.
The first hotel group to benefit from the offering is Accor Hotels; the leading hotel operator in the world.
MasterCard Purchase Control optimizes business-to-business financial transactions with virtual card numbers. Around the world, travel agencies and travel management companies must collaborate with hotels to distill and collate all the data generated throughout the reservation and booking process. As the number of online consumers who reserve hotel rooms directly on the website increases, the amount of related work to secure the reservation and its payment also has increased. Purchase Control delivers enhanced global controls and increased transaction security by combining an integrated preapproval process with secure virtual account numbers. Fully customizable, it can be integrated seamlessly into existing corporate financial infrastructure. The integration not only helps travel agencies and hotels to improve efficiency away from checks and purchase orders, but also reduces the risk of credit card fraud.
"Around the world, transactions between companies, especially with overseas partners, are expanding in a variety of industries, including hotel groups. This is largely due to the growth in non-face-to-face purchasing activities," said Ed Glassman, Group Executive of Global Commercial Products & Solutions at MasterCard. "With it is a significantly increased demand for secure and efficient transactions and payment solutions. Companies who have experienced the inefficiencies and risks of checks and POs can benefit from Purchase Control's security, compliance and analytics which allow them to control spending and might even result in savings from efficiencies."
"MasterCard's Purchase Control solution will enable us to make real-time payments with virtual card numbers to hotels and other partners across the world and will provide more robust data with each transaction to help further automate payment reconciliation and other time-intensive back-end processes. At the same time, we needed to ensure that we implemented a secure payment solution to protect both Hana Tour and our clients. MasterCard's Purchase Control provides all of these benefits," said Sang-Yoon Park, General Manager of Hotel General Team in Hana Tour Service Inc.