How does hotel charging work?
 

I've booked my stay at the Hilton and my idea was to use my profile as Gold and use the Wife's amex for points. On the booking I have my name as the lead and herself as the guest, I placed her card as the billing card and was expecting to be taken to a payment processing but it said it was reserved and I would be charged. A week later and still no charge on a prepaid resevation.

Today I called the hotel and they said will charge possibly in a few days, what I was concerned about was its fine for them to charge my wifes card however do they just put in the numbers and hit charge amount or do they do the address and name check aswell as the first name is naturally different. Was thinking it might be better to change the card to my own but thought I would ask if anyone knew much about how they charged.

Thanks in advance

Where is this hotel located? I find that Hilton hotels outside of the US, even on prepaid reservations, may not charge it until check in. They might charge it a week after the reservation is made. It's property dependent, while US Hilton prepaid reservations charge immediately. I mean when you made the reservation you have to specify the name and billing address for the card. I doubt they care.

I am a Diamond travelling always together with my partner and 90pct of my room payments are done with my partners cc card. Also on prepaid rates. This has never been a problem.

Amex does not check the name on the card when processing payments.

In any case the Hilton site doesn't even ask for the name on the card when making reservations, neither have I noticed any terms or conditions stating that the "lead guest" must be the cardholder.

In some hotels I have seen someone at the front desk manually typing card numbers into their card machine to charge prepaid rates.

ymmv, unknowable in advance, though slightly guessable. For partners with same surname/address/phone, much more likely to go through.

The level of security matching is card-issuer dependant rather than hotel dependent, and within those constraints a card-issuer may have a more precise check if hotel biling card is in an area of the world (read country/city) more prone to suffering CC fraud.

In theory CC and HH-Account should match allof i)first name ii)family name iii)address including country+ post/zip code iv)telephone number

Thing is hotels along with car-hire are one of two business types allowed by natural nature of the business to charge CC without CC holder being present, eg Car-Hire charge for parking tickets/damage post rental but not declared on car return, or hotel charging afternoon of checkout when guest just leaves w/o going via frontdesk. Heck if I am in hurry I avoid frontdesk checkout as they ALL normally refuse a checkout+bill unless i re-present my given/registered CC physically to be swiped when all I really wanted is myvat checkout bill for my expenses.

I even buy my airline tickets from time to time online from overseas (non-UK) sites where the "Billing Country" can not be set to UK where my CC is registered (so use UK address values but country stays as foreign xxxx country), and sometimes payment goes through and sometimes it is rejected

If they don't charge you in advance, at the reception they never cared about whose card I was handing them. At least in Eastern Europe and Turkey + I can confirm Peru/Mexico too.