When a guest books your hotel through Booking.com, Expedia, or Agoda, you often don't receive a bank transfer. Instead, the OTA sends you a virtual credit card — a one-time card number, with an expiry date and CVV, loaded with the value of the booking. To get paid, you have to charge that card yourself.

To charge a virtual card you need a payment terminal or an online payment system that accepts manual card entry. Most small and mid-size hotels in emerging markets don't have either. Local banks often won't issue card terminals to hospitality businesses, and the international payment platforms that could handle it — Stripe, PayPal — either don't operate in the country or don't support the transaction type. So the virtual cards sit in the OTA extranet, uncharted, while the hotel waits and the OTA holds the funds.

The backlogs this creates are significant. Hotels that have been operating on OTA channels for a year or two without a way to charge virtual cards routinely find they have tens of thousands of dollars sitting uncharged. The money is there - the OTA has set it aside - but without the ability to charge the card, the hotel can't access it.

The solution is a payment platform that supports manual virtual card entry. Using Tab, you log into your dashboard, navigate to the virtual card charging section, enter the card number, expiry, and CVV from your OTA extranet, and process the charge. The funds are then paid out to your bank account on the standard weekly payout schedule. Tab supports virtual cards from Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, Trip.com, and most other major OTAs.