News Using WTP Reload to Increase Revenue and Improve the Guest Experience (Inntopia + Siriusware)

In a recent sprint, we went live with some shiny new functionality for hotels and resorts who use Inntopia Commerce and the Siriusware point of sale system. We now validate the WTP media identifier against product type when someone adds a reloadable product to their cart in Inntopia Commerce.

I heard you start to nod off there, but wait. Sometimes, there is some serious excitement hiding in something that sounds mundane.

If you aren’t steeped in the world of Siriusware and Axess brand gates and RFID-enabled cards, you likely have never heard of a WTP number. But they’re rather important, and they’re a good lesson in why the business of integrating hotel e-commerce enterprise software is so challenging (and so important).

Thanks to this new code, resorts and attractions using Siriusware and Axess gates can confidently offer reloadable products in their online stores and other media-not-present transactions, without having to worry about selling a product to someone with a card that’s not eligible for that product. This includes things like season passes, multi-day tickets, discount cards, and other kinds of products that are associated with some sort of reloadable card.

Of course, this is pretty desirable, because it means guests can’t accidentally load a 2018-2019 “child” season pass onto their “adult” season pass card from last year, whether on purpose or (more often) by accident, as one example. This kind of thing can lead to poor customer experience when the mismatch is caught at the scanner, causes lots of manual work from front-line employees who have to fix the issue and sometimes must re-issue physical media, and can lead to lost revenue when not identified by the systems in place.

The challenge, of course, is that every ticketing system (and every gate and scanner provider) uses a different way of connecting the pieces together. In Siriusware, when Axess gates are used, the WTP number is the magic unique identifier for a reloadable card, but that’s only the first part of the story. The hard part is utilizing their API to validate that the card exists and that the person who owns that card is eligible to purchase the season pass or ticket pack they’re trying to add to their cart, doing that in a high-performance way that doesn’t slow down the shopping and checkout process, and developing elegant error messaging and user flows for when there is a mismatch.

Multiply that kind of puzzle across hundreds of property management systems, point-of-sale systems, tee sheets, distribution partners, resellers, suppliers, and more and you can see why we’re thankful to have the best engineering team in the business.

If you’re currently using Inntopia Commerce to sell Siriusware season passes, multi-day tickets, and other reloadable products for use with Axess RFID cards, talk to your account manager today and make sure you’re taking advantage of this enhanced level of integration and security.

As Siriusware’s official one-cart booking partner, we’re excited about the future. Stay tuned for more improvements to our integrations with them, and all the other source systems that let our clients build one-stop e-commerce experiences to sell their lodging, tickets, 3rd-party services, packages, and more.