Credit Card Pre-authorisations
When you check in, we may require a credit card pre-authorisation against your card for an amount between $100 and $200. This requests your bank to guarantee that a future charge against that amount will be possible. Your bank will place a hold on these funds so that it can make that guarantee. This authorisation is used as a bond to guarantee payment for any charges placed onto your room account, and for charges such as breakages or excess cleaning.
Who holds this bond?
The pre-authorisation will create a pending charge in your account. Although the amount is frozen and not available to be used, the actual money is never transferred to us, it is just held by your bank. This pre-authorised amount will usually be shown on your statement as a pending transaction like Pending - Watermark Resort
, but sometimes nothing is shown.
Charges to the bond?
If we make a charge to the credit card after you have departed (whether we have a pre-authorisation or not), we will always send you an updated statement showing the charge and payment with an explanation of why the charge was necessary.
Who releases this bond?
For more than 99% of our guests, there is no need to charge your card after checkout.
In most cases, the feature allowing us to cancel this authorisation is provided by the card and bank, and we will release this pre-authorisation within 7 days of your departure. After it is released, there is usually nothing on your statement to show that the hold was taken and released.
If the ability to release the hold is not supported by your bank or card, it will remain on your account until it expires. In this case, the period taken to release the funds is determined solely by your bank and may be up to 30 days.
It hasn’t been released
If you can still see an entry on your statement like Pending - Watermark Resort
, the pre-authorisation has not yet been released. If it has been more than a 7 days since you departed, please contact us and we will investigate. Sometimes it is possible to manually request your bank to release the funds. If your bank requires us to email or fax them information prior to them releasing the funds, please provide us with all of the details that they require and we will be happy to do so.