[MERGED] New Wyndham payment portal announcement - discussion - reported issues thread

[HitchHiker71]

Like I said the other day, my MF normally hit my WR Visa on August 4 or 5, well, this morning a temporary authorization for what looks like my August MF's showed up, so I guess they did it.

My question is, if we had autopay set up before, do we even have to do anything in the new system or not? It's not clear. I realize eventually it's probably a good idea to go in and set this up, but if autopay is going to continue to work, is there any need to do this in the near term?

Also, since it's a temporary authorization, I won't know for another day or two if I got the 4x bonus WR points properly. If anyone else uses the WR Visa to pay MF's and the transaction has cleared and is showing WR points allocated, did they do it right or is it just a 1:1? If we don't get bonus points, I will probably transition this to a different card like the Chase one.

It’s clear according to the FAQs from the initial announcement here, which was also posted in the other thread on this topic:

Easy Payments In New Online Portal

Announcing Paymentus, a new customer payment portal, coming soon for Club Wyndham owners. Find out more about the enhanced features and how you can better service your account.

clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com

Screenshot for ease of reference:

I’m going to go ahead and merge the two threads on this topic since they are largely duplicative at this point.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Cyrus24]

Trust but Verify. Wyndham does not have a track record of delivering bug free software.

 

[Jan M.]

I must have been one of the lucky ones. I called on Thurday evening and got set up with a password for Paymentus. It must have been a good time to call because I got right through and the call only took a few minutes. She confirmed that we were still set up for autopay and that they have the correct the credit card number. She told me to give it a couple of days for the payment to come out. It came out the next day, 8/11.

 

[spackler]

Why even *have* a separate login? The vast majority of normal companies just have a "pay bill/set up autopay" tab directly on their website w/o resorting to this type of nonsense.

Wyndham likes to screw up even mundane tasks.

 

[paxsarah]

Why even *have* a separate login? The vast majority of normal companies just have a "pay bill/set up autopay" tab directly on their website w/o resorting to this type of nonsense.

Wyndham likes to screw up even mundane tasks.

It’s obviously possible, because that’s exactly what happens with my gas utility website - login to the gas company, click “pay bill,” it sends me seamlessly to my account in Paymentus.

 

[troy12n]

Regarding WHY Wyndham is doing this, i'm just speculating here, but my thought is that due to PCI compliance issues and costs, they made a value decision to completely offload payment processing to a third party. Processing credit cards (aka, taking payments online) is a huge risk, and if they are storing CC numbers, that complicates it even further. So it may have been cheaper and easier from a regulatory perspective to shift this risk to someone else.

I work in IT, so i'm very familiar with why companies do this. My company did it years ago. Look up PCI, and the fines associated with data breaches, as well as regulatory, compliance, documentation and reporting requirements associated with taking credit cards.

We all know how crappy Wyndham's IT is, so from a data security perspective, I think I actually feel a little better with them having done this.

 

[Sandi Bo]

Pssst... Wyndham... It's called Single Sign On.

Single sign-on is an authentication scheme that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. True single sign-on allows the user to log in once and access services without re-entering authentication factors.

I spent 35 years in IT. Gosh, wasn't this a goal over 20 years ago? Always.... Being crappy at IT is no excuse to continue being crappy. But here we are!

And seriously, is EVERYONE going to have to call in and ask for a password reset? If we released something that increased calls to the call centers our heads were on the block.

 

[paxsarah]

Pssst... Wyndham... It's called Single Sign On.

And it’s almost like they already manage to do this with the RCI portal.

 

[markb53]

I’m wondering if others are seeing what I am seeing in Paymentus. In the accounts section I see each of my three contracts listed twice. Once with the contract number, which says paid in full. And after that with the same contract number followed by _PHASE, which says past due. Is anyone else seeing this.

 

[troy12n]

Pssst... Wyndham... It's called Single Sign On.

There's MUCH more to it than just SSO... if you spent 35 years in IT and don't know what PCI is, or the burden of infrastructure requirements are, then maybe read up on them. I'm guessing you were a developer who doesn't know or care about security or anything infrastructure (someone else's problem...)

Like I said, i'm not AT ALL surprised Wyndham is doing this. But their implementation of it leaves a lot to be desired... which I think we can say about every single Wyndham IT initiative

The infrastructure requirements, including encryption at rest and encryption in transit requirements alone are hugely costly. If they can ship that burden to some third party, it's a no brainer. Like I said, my company has billions in annual revenue and we made the decision years ago to subcontract out payment processing so we would not have to implement some of these costly infrastructure requirements...

 

[HitchHiker71]

I’m wondering if others are seeing what I am seeing in Paymentus. In the accounts section I see each of my three contracts listed twice. Once with the contract number, which says paid in full. And after that with the same contract number followed by _PHASE, which says past due. Is anyone else seeing this.

View attachment 62481

Yes I see the same thing. Likely what we are seeing are data integrity issues uploading from the Wyndham system to the paymentUS system best guess. Garbage in garbage out type thing. While Wyndham always hid this data internal to their back end systems, one of the challenges of outsourcing to a third party like this is that your data integrity and any integrity issues become more visible. The data this new third party portal is displaying makes me more certain than ever that Wyndham continues to struggle with back office legacy data integrity problems that have yet to be resolved.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Sandi Bo]

There's MUCH more to it than just SSO... if you spent 35 years in IT and don't know what PCI is, or the burden of infrastructure requirements are, then maybe read up on them. I'm guessing you were a developer who doesn't know or care about security or anything infrastructure (someone else's problem...)

Like I said, i'm not AT ALL surprised Wyndham is doing this. But their implementation of it leaves a lot to be desired... which I think we can say about every single Wyndham IT initiative

The infrastructure requirements, including encryption at rest and encryption in transit requirements alone are hugely costly. If they can ship that burden to some third party, it's a no brainer. Like I said, my company has billions in annual revenue and we made the decision years ago to subcontract out payment processing so we would not have to implement some of these costly infrastructure requirements...

You're conflating 2 different things. I was not suggesting they store the credit card information in the clubwyndhamdestinations website.

It is super concerning to me that @chapjim is seeing the credit card information he input in the clubwyndhamdestinations website (the cards he used for GC's and points protection) show up in paymentus. And the wrong credit card be charged (not the one he had set up for autopay).

Ha, 1st time I've been accused of not caring about something. I have been accused of leading the business because I would be sure they looked at all options when designing features. If the business doesn't know any better, and the developers don't care enough about what they are delivering, you end up with something just like this.

We can agree on one thing - the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. OK, 2 things - we can say that about every single Wyndham IT initiative.

 

[r4rab]

Yes I see the same thing. Likely what we are seeing are data integrity issues uploading from the Wyndham system to the paymentUS system best guess. Garbage in garbage out type thing. While Wyndham always hid this data internal to their back end systems, one of the challenges of outsourcing to a third party like this is that your data integrity and any integrity issues become more visible. The data this new third party portal is displaying makes me more certain than ever that Wyndham continues to struggle with back office legacy data integrity problems that have yet to be resolved.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I also saw something similar when I was able (finally) to login to the paymentUS system. On Friday (8/12) I received an email that Wyndham had received my payment. Like many others, I normally have my payment paid from my CC on the 4th via autopay. I checked my CC and saw the payment was pending. Also on Friday I received a call from someone at Wyndham (Collections dept?). Their first statement was that they were calling to collect a debt. Luckily I only got a little annoyed. The agent was very nice and helped set up my paymentUS login (had to send me a temporary password to do it). On Saturday I received another call with the same script as the Friday call. In both cases I was thinking wtf, the payment is 1 week late because of a known issue in a payment system implementation they screwed up and now I'm getting collection calls. I even told the 1st rep that they needed some better project managers. I didn't mind the calls so much as I was very put off by the lead-in script which I found to be very confrontational.

 

[troy12n]

My MF transaction finally moved from pending to a completed transaction. I did NOT get any bonus WR points. We are supposed to get 3x or 4x (don't remember) bonus on anything Wyndham, including MF and loan payments on the Wyndham Rewards Visa, and I didn't get any for the August MF. I guess I have to make a call to complain...

 

[Ty1on]

I’m wondering if others are seeing what I am seeing in Paymentus. In the accounts section I see each of my three contracts listed twice. Once with the contract number, which says paid in full. And after that with the same contract number followed by _PHASE, which says past due. Is anyone else seeing this.

View attachment 62481

The wording in the top part suggests to me that this might be loan, and either your loan is entirely paid off or you never had a loan.

 

[HitchHiker71]

My MF transaction finally moved from pending to a completed transaction. I did NOT get any bonus WR points. We are supposed to get 3x or 4x (don't remember) bonus on anything Wyndham, including MF and loan payments on the Wyndham Rewards Visa, and I didn't get any for the August MF. I guess I have to make a call to complain...

I see what you mean now - the actual CC transaction is no longer being recognized as MFs and so therefore it’s only showing as 1x for WR credits as opposed to 4x (I have the Earners Plus card). I suspect this is something that Barclays will have to change within their systems. Kudos to Wyndham for not testing this in advance and ensuring a smooth transition with their affinity credit card provider. I will report this to Wyndham today as I already have a thread open on PaymentUS related items. I will report back with an update on this item when appropriate.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[chapjim]

I'm starting all over again on hold for Financial Services. Last attempt ended after 1:05:45 when a voice came on and offered a survey. I did the survey (all "1s") and was disconnected.

Being on hold wouldn't be so bad except for the "music" they have on a loop. They need some Marty Robbins! Oh! And the information about mortgage interest statements being available the last week in January. This is August! Are a lot of people asking about mortgage interest statements now?

 

[HitchHiker71]

The wording in the top part suggests to me that this might be loan, and either your loan is entirely paid off or you never had a loan.

For my part - I never had a loan. I just submitted this issue, along with the reported WR credit card issue - to Wyndham for further review. If anyone else experiences any issues, please report them here in this thread, and we'll then attempt to reproduce and report the issues as needed.

 

[Sandi Bo]

If you are looking for issues

I would suggest different wording / identification for messages coming from the payment portal.

If it were me, I'd use the same verbiage used on the clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations site... there this is called the 'Paymentus Customer Portal'. I would world this message
title accordingly, as well as the message itself (indicate it's the paymentus customer portal account).

I think there is already confusion about having a separate logon and password. And then they send this message when the password is reset....

Also, if you click on the link above it takes you to the 'Customer Portal' - too bad it doesn't say 'Paymentus Customer Portal'.

 

[WManning]

For anyone who didn’t already receive the email announcement today:

"Get Ready For Easy Payments In A New Online Portal." Some of the new features you can look forward to include:

A new customer portal with several 24/7 self-service features.

• Enroll in Auto-Pay.

• Schedule and make payments.

• View balances, statements and transactions.

• Add payment options to your virtual wallet.

• Get notifications when payments are processed.

• Access financial information for all accounts in one place. https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/resort-news/paymentus

One item worth noting from the website link regarding the credit reporting elements:

If I’m reading this announcement correctly - the new Paymentus third party billing website will finally support both MFs and loans for all accounts in one centralized place.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Just called in and set up yesterday afternoon. Less then 2 minutes to recieve link on changing password and signing in.

 

[Sandi Bo]

Just called in and set up yesterday afternoon. Less then 2 minutes to recieve link on changing password and signing in.

You think everyone has to call in? I did (it was not a 2 minute call, but they were very nice). But the big question I would think, is does everyone have to call in at some point to get their login to work?

 

[r4rab]

Just another data point that may relate to the WR issue. My MFs were recognized as a travel-related expense by Chase Sapphire. The payee was Club Wyndham Plus. It's possible the WR CC issue may be on the Barclays Bank side.

 

[paxsarah]

You think everyone has to call in? I did (it was not a 2 minute call, but they were very nice). But the big question I would think, is does everyone have to call in at some point to get their login to work?

Exactly this question. Has Wyndham created a situation in which every single owner will have to call in at some point if they want to get online access to their online financial account? My autopay did eventually go through, but at some point I'm going to want to update my card, review past charges, etc, and will have to call to get this password situation sorted out.

Or they could just allow those passwords to be reset online.

 

[WManning]

You think everyone has to call in? I did (it was not a 2 minute call, but they were very nice). But the big question I would think, is does everyone have to call in at some point to get their login to work?

No setup or login necessary. I am new owner the at had a deed transfer in on July 26th. Just wanted to make sure that my auto pay I set up on the 26th was set up correct because maintenance fees were not debited from credit card.

 

[HitchHiker71]

If you are looking for issues

I would suggest different wording / identification for messages coming from the payment portal.

If it were me, I'd use the same verbiage used on the clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations site... there this is called the 'Paymentus Customer Portal'. I would world this message
title accordingly, as well as the message itself (indicate it's the paymentus customer portal account).

I think there is already confusion about having a separate logon and password. And then they send this message when the password is reset....

View attachment 62561

Also, if you click on the link above it takes you to the 'Customer Portal' - too bad it doesn't say 'Paymentus Customer Portal'.

View attachment 62562

Feedback captured and sent to Wyndham for review.