Payment help and support

Dear valued Holiday Extras customer

We are aware that some of our customers have been having difficulties with paying on our website and app.

Cause of problems

The Financial Conduct Authority FCA has mandated (from 14th March 2022) that banks and payment providers verify your identity to authorise payments you make online using "Strong Customer Authentication" (SCA). It's designed to reduce the risk of fraud but can also introduce a few more hoops for our customers to jump through; like waiting for a text message, authorising a transaction with your banking app or typing in another password.

Holiday Extras uses a technology called 3DSecure Version 2.2 to handle payment authentication. It's the most up to date and the most widely supported option but still has issues from time to time and is being continually updated.

What we're doing

Despite our endeavours to make payment as simple as possible we are aware more customers than we'd like are struggling with the process. We have fed this back to the FCA and UKFinance (who are responsible for the roll out) and our payment processor Mastercard/TNSI and acquirer WorldPay. Given the number of reservations we make and the number of customers we have (we handle an average of 20 transactions every minute, 24 hours a day 365 days a year) the smallest issue can cause a big issue for us and for you.

Normal service levels are stretched

It's our mission to offer the very best service we can and through our smartest, fastest most personal service offering we normally answer 80% of calls in 20 seconds, a chat in less than 30 seconds and respond to emails within 24 hours. Sadly with the current volume of payment issues seen and felt across the UK we are not running the service we like.

Before getting in touch, please check the following possible solutions

• Many, many customers are reporting they are not receiving a security code from their bank or payment provider. Please check you have more than two bars of signal on your mobile phone for a text message else please follow up with your bank and try again.
• Customers with an old version of our APP do not see the authentication check - this is fixed in the latest version of our app.
• Customers using vouchers are asked to renew their card details even if the voucher covers the price of the booking - this is required and normal and will allow the system to refund any amendment made to your booking.
• New customers sometimes see an error when creating an account - we are working on a fix for this issue.
• Sometimes (a very rare issue) the authentication screen does not load at all even after hitting retry - we are working on a fix for this.

Rest assured our technical team is reviewing every payment issue. We will continue to improve the process and restore our service levels but it may take some time as customers get used to this new technology.

The Holiday Extras Team

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More information

https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/strong-customer-authentication
https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/strong-customer-authentication
https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/3d-secure