5 Questions with Ana Arjones

1.???? Tell us about your role at Mastercard

I am part of Mastercard’s global B2B Travel team which works with organizations across the travel payments ecosystem. My specific focus is in hospitality, working with our hotel partners on a number of priority areas and initiatives, including:

Enhancing hotel payment flows through new technologies and solutions that bring efficiencies and interact with all the payment touch points. I work with our partners to enhance experience when paying and accepting digital payments in hotel indirect sales channel, driving implementations that complement existing successful solutions such as the Mastercard Wholesale Program.

Increasing awareness in the benefits of digital payments, and providing education. Payments remain an untapped area in the hospitality sector and there are significant development opportunities when it comes to payment technology, strategy, and management. The hospitality ecosystem is incredibly complex and fragmented so it’s important that payment and technology providers, as well as regulators, understand the payment operation nuances unique to the hotel industry – it is something Mastercard has significant experience in and has invested in a team with deep knowledge so that we can support the sector on this journey.

2.???? What challenges / priorities do you hear from your hotel partners?

We really take the time to get to know our partners, listening to their specific challenges is a priority for us as only then can we apply technology where it will have most impact. What we hear is that personnel shortages, revenue growth and increasing payment acceptance rates are top-of-mind priorities for hoteliers these days. Finding solutions and implementing processes that can help hotels’ employees minimize the amount of time spent in admin tasks and focus on servicing guests whilst reducing costs and maximizing revenues is critical to ensuring the satisfaction of the external and internal guests and ultimately will drive success of the business.

3.???? What’s Mastercard’s role in addressing these priorities / challenges?

To address hotel operational issues experienced today, such as declines, overcharges and disputes, Mastercard is digitizing and automating payments between them and travel intermediaries. In a recent piece of research from Mastercard, hoteliers shared that resolving payment issues with travel intermediaries can take hours to days to be resolved which is clearly a significant challenge in the day-to-day running of a property.?

Additionally, we have a customised virtual card product for the sector, the Mastercard Wholesale Program, that has a dynamic pricing structure and fixed regional acquiring costs to promote closer alignment with distribution partners to ensure that the appropriate payment product supports each variable such market and currency, while providing a payment guarantee and improved cash flow to hotels.

4.???? How can hotels adapt to new payment demands from guests?

A study by American Banker showed that the top two factors which consumers consider important when completing a digital purchase are price and acceptance of their preferred payment (both at 95%).

Due to decentralised structure of the hotel industry, it’s very hard for hotels to offer alternative payment options to cards. Meanwhile the use of mobile wallets, BNPL and other payment methods are on the rise.

Industry partners such as travel agencies ?are key to helping hoteliers capture customers who want to pay with a method that’s not offered by the hotel through the direct sales channel.

Additionally, travel agencies help boost hotel sales in geographies where the hotel brand is not established, or with customers that are not the hotel’s target segment. Leveraging travel agency marketing power can drive sales and maximise occupancy rates for hotels, so payment products that have mutual benefits are helping the whole ecosystem grow and come back stronger.

5.???? How is Mastercard contributing with the travel & hotel industry beyond payments?

As the travel sector continues to recover and grow, we believe that it is time to rethink travel innovation, Mastercard?is committed to advancing technologies that support the travel sector's needs today, and we are doing this in a few ways, including:

- Pioneering virtual cards to optimize B2B payments through the Mastercard Wholesale Program.

- Combining secure data from multiple sources to mitigate risk with the T&E Risk Monitor.

- Providing payment insights and analysis to understand evolving market and consumer needs.

- Building loyalty that connects and inspires.

- Collaborating with government and tourism agencies, as well as private partners to scale innovation and drive the sector's sustainable recovery.

Mastercard’s Tourism Innovation Hub (the Hub), a center for developing and implementing solutions to meet the needs of governments, small businesses, local communities and travelers, partners with the public and private sectors to build a more sustainable, resilient and inclusive tourism sector.? ?One organization with whom I have had a strong collaboration with across my career, The TravelTech Lab by HBX Group (formerly Hotelbeds), recently joined the Hub to collaborate on accelerating innovation on joint sustainability and inclusive tourism projects. I am incredibly excited about this next phase of our collaboration, and I look forward to what Mastercard and HBX Group can jointly achieve.