Originally Posted by
WidgetTravels
The address verification system hasn't changed in years for Res. Don't know quite what you're talking about here. We have an error message sent to us when the address is wrong, if the CID/Expiration Date is wrong, if the card number is wrong, etc.
If the response comes back that card is declined, it means all information on Delta's side is correct, but the bank isn't authorizing the charge. This can be for a variety of reasons, the most likely is that there are not enough funds on the card.
Now this is where things COULD'VE been caused by the rep on the Delta side. If they don't put in the international billing address properly (there's a separate field for non US/Canada addresses), the card would've errored out due to the address being put in incorrectly. But it still pulls pending funds from the card. Then, when the address is inputted correctly, the agent wouldn't have received the wrong address, but not enough funds (or over a daily limit/suspected fraud) were available.
There was an update about 18 months ago that briefly caused hangups with card payments, but that had nothing to do with the billing address. It was quickly fixed.
There is still an ongoing issue (unless recently fixed at last, I've been told it's been on the list of major bugs to fix for years now) cards where the issuer doesn't support AVS and the AVS response is X. As some who've been involved in testing and rolling it out tell me, devs forgot to put in handling for that so the system simply hangs. I've had that confirmed to me several times. Basically, phone reps need to call the Delta merchant account processor and do phone auth, but most get confused and don't know how to properly do that (they need to find the #, the Delta merchant account, etc., and then key in the phone authorization properly in the system - all things that supposedly "Delta no longer trains" its staff in and that are hardly well documented). Online it works, but doesn't work by phone. By phone only works in the old reservations system/interface that was at least less buggy. Other than phone auth, that is the only other workaround for Delta res agents.