Year End Evaluations: Credit Card Processing

[swirt]

It's that time again where I am crunching all the numbers getting them ready for taxes and in the mean time processing them for a bit of reflection.
I just looked at the 2009 expenditures for credit card processing.
Using Intuit Processing as my processor, I got 2.62% for my overall processing fees and discounts. [This includes all transaction fees, access charges and other gotchyas. The only thing it does not include is the monthly $12.95 fee. I left that out of the equation because we are closed half the year and this fee looks huge for those months with no income and would skew the numbers for the rest of you.]
Feel free to share your year end values. It can be pretty informative as long as we make sure we are comparing apples to apples.

 

[Morticia]

Do you take AmEx and Discover?

 

[Don Draper]

We take Visa, MC and Disc and our average for the year was 2.59% with First Data. We do address verification on our terminal and that percentage includes every fee.

 

[swirt]

Do you take AmEx and Discover?.

We take V, MC and Disc, but NOT Amex.
I should also add that we take a 1 night deposit on every reservation so that increases our percentages a bit. The majority of our reservations come online and are charged directly through the Rezovation Booking Engine so those go through at the higher not-present rate. They do perform address validation which if they pass gets them through at mid-qualified, but if the address fails it goes through at the Non-qualified rate. I'll also point out that we have a constant 2-night minimum so all of are charges are typically for 2 or more nights.