How do I Handle Overcharges Chinese (CN)/简体中文

How do I Handle Overcharges Chinese (HK)/中文 (香港)

How do I Handle Overcharges Chinese (TW)/繁體中文

How do I Handle Overcharges Japanese/日本語

How do I Handle Overcharges Korean/한국어(대한민국)

How do I Handle Overcharges Thai/ไทย

This article will help you to identify why you may have overcharges or negative balance showing in your Finance tab for ePass only. 

What is an overcharge?

An “overcharge” is defined as any instance where you have charged Agoda more than what was supposed to be paid and therefore Agoda needs to recover the excess amount back.

Overcharges include but are not limited to:

• Cancellations/Amendments outside policy — If your payment terms are before check-in date, you have charged an Agoda UPC and there is a cancellation/amendment by customer outside policy, this will result in an overcharge, requiring collection.
• Cancellations/Amendments inside policy —  When you agree to refund the customer on a non-refundable booking, it can result in an overcharge.
• Others  — Fraud, force-charges, manual entry errors etc.

The Finance tab will only allow you to submit positive batches, and you will receive an error message if you try to submit a batch with a negative balance.

You may see a manual adjustment posted by our Finance team, which may be due to:

• Overcharging related to multi-currency transactions
• Outdated tax rate on bookings
• Agreements to allow customer to cancel with different cancellation policy than on original booking
• When a Cancelled or No Show Booking is charged with full payment before status is updated on YCS

If you have recently migrated to ePass (Telex Transfer; Ecard; UPC on Epass (UPC+) or Paypal) from another payment method, there may be some payments that cannot be migrated to ePass. This is due to a system limitation and if this happens, our Finance team will post an adjustment to reflect the missing balance. You will be able to include this in your next payment batch.

Where can I see overcharge information?

When booking status changed to canceled or no show, the payment that eligible for you to charge will be updated depending on the cancellation policy setup. If you have charged the booking before the status updated, Agoda may adjust by posting a negative amount to balance the amount.

If you are:

Not on ePass: Our Finance team will contact you and will arrange for the overcharge to be cleared by manually amending the system, or if you are on UPC payment method, amend the UPC batch or issue a new UPC to charge.

On ePass:

1. When you receive the negative amount, find the related Booking ID.
2. Go to Finance> All Transactions.
3. Search the booking transaction (can be based on check-in, check-out, or booking date), and click Search. 
4. Find the specific Booking ID.

When you find that the Booking ID has more than 1 posted amount, and 1 of them is negative it means Agoda has balanced out the payment. Check the article “How do I review past payments?” to check details on previously submitted payments.

Collection process:

• Collection Process for UPC Payment Method
  • Every Monday, the system pulls overcharges report at a booking level, generates a PDF invoice on Hotel ID (HID) level, and emails an invoice to all contact details for the hotel ID available in YCS.
  • The invoice will request you to refund the overcharges detailed at a booking level onto the same UPCs you have charged, and specifically mentioned a 2-week timeline to refund to avoid a chargeback by Agoda.
• Collection Process on UPC on ePass Payment Method
  • Only when the overcharge remaining more than 60 days in Epass. Every Monday, the system pulls overcharges at a batch level, it generates a PDF invoice on Hotel ID level, and emails an invoice to all contact details for your hotel available in YCS.
  • The invoice will request property to refund the overcharges detailed at a booking level onto the same UPCs you have charged, and specifically mentioned a 2-week timeline to refund to avoid a chargeback by Agoda.

In any case, we recommend you to respond back to the original email or contact us at: Collections@agoda.com

What happens next?

• If you did not refund within 2 weeks and collection agents do not have information to show the relevant overcharges were due to internal errors, an auto-chargeback is initiated.
• Upon chargeback, Agoda gets the money back within 1-2 days through your acquiring bank. You then have the right to dispute the chargeback (through your acquiring bank) if you believe that money was not owed to Agoda, but you have to provide some documentary evidence proving this to your acquiring bank. If you dispute a chargeback, you will receive the money back through your bank until such time as Agoda decides to counter your dispute.
• In the event Agoda gets a dispute from you which is routed to Agoda through our issuing bank, Agoda also has the right to counter your dispute if the chargeback team believes there is sufficient evidence to show Agoda has the right to recover the money. If neither Agoda nor you agree, the final stage is arbitration where the relevant card company gets involved to resolve the dispute.
• Any chargeback process has costs for both Agoda and properties which increase with disputes. We prefer having properties refund voluntarily when they receive an invoice.

In any case, after you receive a chargeback from the bank, please contact us at AC-Chargeback@agoda.com.

How do I resume payment processing?

If you have a negative balance, you can submit a batch to make your balance positive again. There may be cases when the batch decreases the negative amount but the overall balance remains negative. In the example below, no UPC will be issued as the balance remains negative.
In the example below, you can see a case where the batch does not fully clear the outstanding balance.

After you have cleared this negative balance, you will be able to charge future bookings as per usual process.
In the example below, you can see an example of a negative balance being cleared.

FAQs