> At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed by airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer)
One concern that comes to mind about this is if the credit card companies would consider this purchase as "travel". Like where Chase Sapphire Reserve gives triple points for travel purchases, and also has a $300 travel credit, but either of those things would only work if Chase considers your service as "travel", rather than "online service" or whatever.
You may have already worked this out and gotten it classified as travel, and if so it would just be a nice thing to put on a FAQ or whatever.
Same for credit cards that offer travel insurance as long as the flights/rental cars etc. are booked through them. They'd most likely need to see the charge from the airline in order for the coverage to be effective.
Good point. Travel Point multipliers can be achieved via setting a merchant code (MCC) of travel on charges (stripe, for example, supports this.
The trip insurance card benefit— I don’t think we can satisfy right now. We’re exploring ways to use the user’s own CC with the end vendor (eg airline) rather than us charging the user separately. “credit card tokenization” should work here (Spreedly, TokenX) but it’s non trivial due to how many vendors are in the space
Email me if either of these are stopping you from wanting to use the service, and we’ll figure out a workaround or let you know when it’s solved!
Normally insurance is still valid in case of intermediaries, your travel insurance is perfectly valid if you booked through an OLTA. Maybe it’s just a question of certification?
One concern that comes to mind about this is if the credit card companies would consider this purchase as "travel". Like where Chase Sapphire Reserve gives triple points for travel purchases, and also has a $300 travel credit, but either of those things would only work if Chase considers your service as "travel", rather than "online service" or whatever.
You may have already worked this out and gotten it classified as travel, and if so it would just be a nice thing to put on a FAQ or whatever.