Hospitality businesses store, transmit, and revisit payments constantly—and every one of these transactions is a potential target for fraud. Hotels keep customer cards on file for room upgrades, minibar tabs, and late checkouts. Restaurants handle thousands of swipes a day, often on terminals connected across multiple locations. Spas and resorts accept deposits months in advance. These transactions create opportunities for criminals looking to skim card details, intercept transactions, or slip through weak points in a business’s reservation system.

When a breach happens, it costs the business money, creates compliance issues, and hurts brand image and customer loyalty. A US hospitality company, for example, agreed to pay $52 million in a 2024 settlement following data breaches that affected more than 300 million customers worldwide.

Below, we’ll explain the risks hospitality businesses face and how to handle them before they become a problem—including how to lock down payment data without slowing down the guest experience.

What’s in this article?

• Why is payment security so important for the hospitality industry?
  
• What are the biggest threats to hospitality payment data?
  
• How can hospitality businesses secure payment systems?
  

Why is payment security so important for the hospitality industry?

The hospitality industry faces unique challenges around payment security. From booking a room, to opening a bar tab, to checking out of a resort, every transaction forms part of the guest experience. Unlike in retail or ecommerce, hospitality payments are often tied to long stays, high-value transactions, and different types of personal data.

Here’s what makes payment security particularly high-stakes for hospitality businesses.

An extended payment window

When a guest checks into a hotel, their card remains on file for days (sometimes longer), which few other industries require. This creates a longer window for potential breaches.

Payment information is stored in multiple channels

Hotels and resorts accept in-person card payments at the front desk, but they also accept deposits online, process incidental charges during a stay, settle bills through apps, and manage rewards programs that store card data. Each additional payment channel is another potentially vulnerable surface for attack.

High-value transactions create a bigger target

A fast-food restaurant that processes $10 orders usually doesn’t draw the same level of fraud as a luxury hotel processing $5,000 reservations. Cybercriminals go where the money is, and hospitality businesses—especially those handling premium bookings, corporate accounts, or extended stays—are lucrative targets. A single breach can expose a high volume of payment data at once, sometimes across multiple locations if systems aren’t properly segmented.

Criminals might target personal information, too

Payment security in hospitality goes beyond protecting card numbers. It includes safeguarding the entire guest profile: name, email, phone number, home address, passport details, and sometimes even travel habits. This kind of personal data is a gold mine for identity thieves. Even if attackers are unable to use a stolen credit card number, they can still sell a guest’s personal details for fraud or phishing scams.

Reputation damage is hard to recover from

Hospitality is built on trust. Staying at a hotel or resort, and interacting with the staff in person, creates a more personal customer experience than buying something online. A breach can shake customer confidence in a way that discounts and PR campaigns can’t always fix.

What are the biggest threats to hospitality payment data?

Unlike ecommerce—where payments are mostly online and automated—hospitality runs on a mix of human interaction, legacy tech, and long-duration payment holds. These elements create vulnerabilities for criminals to exploit. Here are some of the most common tactics cybercriminals use to gain access to hospitality businesses.

Third-party booking system breaches

Even if a hotel locks down its own payment system, the system is often connected to third-party platforms for reservations, spa services, dining, or concierge requests. Every integration is a potential weak link. Attackers might find that the easiest entry point is a smaller, overlooked vendor with weaker security.

Staff manipulation

Hospitality has a high employee turnover rate, seasonal staffing, and a workforce that might be trained more on customer service than security. Cybercriminals can exploit this through social engineering—impersonating hotel managers, IT support, or even guests to trick employees into handing over login credentials or bypassing security protocols.

Insider fraud

In restaurants, bars, and hotels, employees sometimes have direct access to payment terminals. That means an insider with bad intentions can get their hands on customer payment data and carry out a more serious fraud scheme, stealing thousands of customers’ data at once.

Point-of-sale (POS) attacks

Many hospitality businesses rely on POS systems that are connected across multiple locations. If malware infects one terminal, it can quickly spread to every other POS system on the network. These attacks are particularly dangerous because they don’t just steal data in one place—they turn every checkout point into a potential leak. In 2015, for example, a US hospitality company discovered that its payment processing system was infected with malware for stealing credit card information, which might have affected hundreds of its hotels.

How can hospitality businesses secure payment systems?

The usual advice for improving payment security—such as encrypting transactions or maintaining Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance—is important, but it’s not enough for hospitality businesses. Hotels or restaurants that only follow compliance checklists are still vulnerable. Real security means designing payments to reduce exposure and weak points, and to make it harder for criminals to operate in the first place—all without disrupting the customer experience or sacrificing convenience.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Hide payment data before criminals can steal it

Tokenization replaces sensitive payment details with a random string of characters called a “token.” If an attacker breaches your system, they won’t find any credit card numbers—just useless tokens. Tokenization ensures that even if criminals break in, there’s nothing valuable for them to steal. Use a payment provider that offers built-in tokenization.

Limit who (and what) touches payment data

Many breaches happen because an attacker finds a weak point somewhere other than the core payment processing system—maybe an unprotected staff login, an old integration, or a third-party vendor with flawed security. Hospitality businesses can reduce their risk by:

• Limiting permissions to only what each role actually needs

• Not letting their POS system share a network with guest Wi-Fi

• Not storing payment data in the same system as customer loyalty information

• Vetting third-party vendors’ security measures

Design smart systems to avoid employee errors

Whether it’s clicking a phishing email or falling for a phone call from hackers posing as IT support, human error is sometimes the easiest way in for attackers. Instead of only training employees to be more careful, design systems that make it harder for mistakes to happen in the first place:

• Use two-factor authentication (2FA) for payment logins. Even if an employee’s password gets stolen, 2FA blocks access.

• Limit email access on POS systems. If front desk computers or restaurant terminals can’t check email, phishing attempts become less of an issue.

Replace outdated hardware before criminals exploit it

In hospitality, hardware is just as vulnerable as software. Hotels and restaurants rely on POS terminals, card readers, and key card systems—all of which need to be continuously updated. Outdated hardware makes it easier for attackers to skim card data, install malware, or slip through weak encryption. Consider the following:

• Upgrade POS terminals to models with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and EMV (chip card) support.

• Replace card readers or check-in kiosks that haven’t had recent firmware updates.

• Accept Tap to Pay and mobile payments (such as digital wallets) to reduce reliance on physical cards, which are easier to compromise.