I checked out yesterday morning, and the front desk guy had been trained on the new system. I asked him to explain it to me, which he did. He was great.

Basically, as others have mentioned, it's now a multi-step process.

The first step is to figure out how much of the card will be used. If the card balance is greater than the amount for the hotel stay, that's easy. They just take the folio amount and write it down. Otherwise, they use the entire card balance. If the customer doesn't know the amount, they check it during step two. Step two is to contact the company that administers the card. This can be done by phone or internet. Basically, the hotel needs to manually deduct the amount of the credit you need from your card through the company. If you don't know know your balance, they check it during this step. They then have the appropriate amount deducted. They get an authorization code back. Step three is to go into their system and pay your bill using a new special code and entering the authorization number.

This guy knew what he was doing, but even so it took 5 minutes. He said the trouble comes in when people have multiple smaller cards -- each needs to be run and he needs to get an authorization number for each, and then each of those needs to be entered into the system to deduct the amount on the bill. For example, if you have a 183.00 bill and four $50 gift cards, he needs to get four separate authorizations -- three for $50 each and one for $33 on the fourth card, and he has to be careful to make sure he remembers which card to give you back with the $17 on it. Then he needs to pay off your bill in 4 steps, entering each authorization number separately.

Edit: The one other thing he noted is that if they make a mistake at the property level, they're toast. They can't fix it at the property. For example, if they over deduct from your gift card, it's a problem.