How Pinnacle Won a $14,000 Chargeback Against AMEX and Reduced Chargebacks by 30–85% across their Portfolio with Canary

Sue Russ DePascale, Pinnacle Management’s Vice President of Finance, was looking for a way to make her team more efficient.

Pinnacle was reliant on a paper- and fax-based process, with file cabinets dotting their offices to store their customers’ information. This outdated process required extraneous back and forth with customers and created unnecessary work for Pinnacle’s employees. And since it wasn’t PCI compliant, it put their customer information at risk.

Pinnacle first considered some competing products. But general-purpose tools weren’t built with hotel-focused workflows in mind. “Canary’s technology was better and more hotel-friendly,” Sue said.

Sue found Canary to be simple to set up and use, with great training tools. It was quick and easy to learn for her and her team. One property in her portfolio had a $14K chargeback by a guest using an AMEX card. Because of Canary's audit trail, her property was able to win the chargeback in their favor.

"It’s the Canary link that convinced Amex we were good with charging the guest the $14K!!!"

30–85% Decrease in Chargebacks Across Pinnacle’s Portfolio

Implementing Canary brought new efficiencies to Sue’s team. “We got rid of so many paper processes,” she says. Plus, with Canary, Pinnacle saw an 30–85% decrease in credit card chargebacks. “The decrease in chargebacks is huge for our hotels that utilized Canary,” Sue says.