P-card setup

Best practices for acquiring and using purchase cards for flight loyalty redemption.

P-cards, also known as purchasing or procurement cards, are credit cards issued by an organization to allow direct business-related purchases, including travel.

Overview

Flight carriers are the merchant of record (or agency) for the majority of inventory for both standalone flights and the flight components of a package booking. A P-card is required to secure flight bookings when the flight carrier is the merchant of record and loyalty currency is redeemed for the booking. Full cash bookings will not be charged to your P-cards.

During booking, we use the Points Bank API to redeem the traveler’s loyalty points. The air carrier will charge the P-card for both all-points and split-pay (cash and points) scenarios at the time of booking. This applies to the flight portion of a package burn booking as well.

In split-pay scenarios, we charge the customer’s credit card and collect funds for the cash portion. We then remit the cash portion to your organization (documented in a split cash report) and debit the traveler’s Points Bank for the redeemed amount. Your organization will remit the cash value of the points redeemed along with the cash portion of the fare to the carrier.

Once the payment is received, you’ll receive a statement from the P-card processor that includes transaction details and references to the air carrier. At the same time, we’ll debit the traveler's Points Bank for the redeemed amount.

We’ll send you a weekly split-cash payment to support reconciliation of both the P-card charges and the Points Bank transactions for air travel.

Acquiring P-cards

P-cards should be issued by your preferred financial institution, and you’ll confirm the payment processor with them. We recommend that you set a credit limit based on projected monthly transaction volume and Expedia’s estimated monthly flight booking value, which your account manager can provide.

Best practices for setup

It’s best to have multiple P-cards issued to your organization. This redundancy will prevent disruptions if the credit limit is exceeded or if issues arise with the primary card.

To reduce the risk of bad actors guessing the next card number, be sure that your P-cards don’t have sequential numbers. In addition, you should ensure that your cards are configured for both purchases and refunds.

We recommend that you restrict cards to specific travel merchant categories. Limiting authorized sellers enhances protection for both your organization and ours.

Note: We monitor P-card transaction success. If a card is flagged for repeated failure, our development team will enable the secondary card to ensure the transaction's success.

Setting up a P-card with Expedia

You can provide the required information to your Expedia account manager either verbally or via secure email. Once the P-card is set up in our system, the card number is tokenized. It is not stored or documented.

We require the following information to set up your P-cards in our system:

• Complete credit card number
• CVV (card verification value)
• Expiration date
• Exact name on the account (must be issued to an individual, not a company)
• Complete billing address