During a hurricane or flood emergency, our client will help the government agencies by placing refugees in temporary housing, which most of the time are hotels and motels. Booking with physical cards can be a hassle since they can be stolen or misused, plus tracking which card was used with a family at a particular hotel was not easy.
Issues
Imagine having to arrange housing for hundreds of families during an emergency such as a hurricane, tornado or another natural disaster. A lot of hotels will not allow a booking unless a valid credit card is used, so if it’s stolen or lost our client needed to call back all the facilities to make sure they have the updated card. We helped them by creating temporary cards in Access per family. The card is valid for 30 or 60 days only.
Using virtual credit cards to book refugees.
Using the issuer virtual credit card API, we programmed Microsoft Access to request, retrieve and store temporary cards into the database. Now instead of using one card for many reservations, our client uses one temporary card per reservation. If it gets stolen it’s no big deal, since it’s only tied to one reservation.
Requesting hundreds of temporary cards.
Users click a button to request a temporary card using the API and actually see the card on the screen, they can then read the card, expiration date and CCV code over the phone to the hotel plus assign it to a particular family in the database.
The hardest part? Getting the issuer to approve our client generating all the cards.
Our development team sat in on several meetings with the bank and the credit card companies through out the project and during Alpha and Beta testing stages, it was all worth it in the end to make the operation much more efficient and help the families out.
