Change the Card Your Subscription Is Billed To

Change the Card Your Subscription Is Billed To

Your card lives with Stripe, not with LobbyFlight, so changing it means opening the Stripe customer portal from your billing page. This article shows you where that page is, who can open it, and what happens to your displays if a payment does not go through.

Billing is in the account menu, and only owners see it

Billing used to sit in the sidebar and no longer does. It is now in the account menu behind your avatar in the top right corner, together with analytics and API access, because it is an occasional errand rather than daily work. Open the menu and choose Billing to land on the billing page.

The entry only appears for accounts with the org owner role. If you are signed in as a manager or as concierge staff, the menu will not show Billing at all — this is not a display problem, and there is no other route to the page. Ask whoever owns the organization to make the change, or have them change your role first. See Roles and Access for what each role can reach.

One more thing to know before you start: billing is organization-wide, not per property. The portal opens for your organization's Stripe customer, so the card you store there pays for every property in the organization. Only your main property carries the subscription; every other hotel has no separate billing account of its own and appears as an additional hotel on the same invoice.

Opening the Stripe portal

Anything Stripe holds about you as a customer is edited in that same portal, including your billing address and your VAT ID. Both are collected when you first subscribe — the address is required, the VAT ID is optional and drives tax handling — so if either changes, the Stripe portal is the place to correct it.

Two cases where the button behaves differently

Complimentary accounts have no Stripe portal. If your account is on complimentary access, the billing page shows an explanation of your access instead of the subscription buttons, and the request to open the Stripe portal is refused before it reaches Stripe. There is no subscription and no card behind such an account. To convert it to a paid plan, write to info@lobbyflight.com.

Demo installations show an alert. If the installation is not configured with a live Stripe key, clicking Manage Subscription produces a short notice that the Stripe portal is unavailable in demo mode. Nothing is broken; there is simply no Stripe account to open.

What LobbyFlight knows about your card

Nothing. The only thing stored on our side is your Stripe customer ID, which is a reference to your record at Stripe. There is no field in our database for a card brand, for the last four digits, or for an expiry date, and no page in the portal renders a card. Everything you would recognize about your payment method exists only inside Stripe's portal, which is why the update always happens there.

When the card actually gets charged

You do not need a card to start: every account begins with a 14-day free trial that runs without any payment method. A card (or SEPA mandate) is only asked for when you choose a plan under Avatar menu → Billing. If you choose one during the trial (with at least two days to go), the days you have left carry over and the card is first charged when the trial ends; if you choose one afterwards, it is charged straight away. As long as you have not chosen a plan, you receive an email three days and again one day before the trial ends reminding you to choose one. If you have already chosen one, you instead get a single email three days before the first charge, with its date and amount.

After that, the charge follows the interval you chose. Monthly billing charges the plan price each period. Yearly billing charges ten monthly prices for twelve months, which is 690 € for Basic, 1,490 € for Pro and 1,990 € for Premium — two months are free. The billing page shows the price at the top of the plan card and the next renewal underneath as Renews on <date>, as two separate pieces of information rather than one combined line.

Add-ons ride on the same payment method. Additional hotels cost 49 € per month each, additional airports on the Pro and Premium plans 99 € per month each, and concierge charges are settled against the same Stripe customer, so they appear alongside the subscription rather than on a separate bill.

If a payment fails

Failure is visible immediately, not after a waiting period. The moment Stripe reports a declined payment, three things happen at once: your subscription status becomes past due, a payment-failure email goes to your hotel address, and your dashboard gains a critical Payment failed notice that links straight to the billing page. That dashboard notice is the most reliable place to catch a card problem, because you will see it on the page you open anyway.

Your displays keep running through all of this. A subscription that is past due still counts as live, so nothing on the wall changes because a card expired.

What does end service is the end of the subscription. When Stripe finally cancels it, or marks it unpaid after its retries, our webhook marks the subscription cancelled on your main property and pauses every other hotel in the organisation, so their screens switch off. Nothing is deleted, and the paused hotels switch back on by themselves once a subscription is paid again. So there is time to fix a card, but the deadline is Stripe's final decision, not the failed charge. What Happens When Payment Fails covers the sequence in more detail.

Separately, a quieter notice appears on the dashboard in the last seven days before a billing period ends. It is informational and simply tells you the renewal is close.

Invoices after a successful payment

Every successful payment sends an invoice by email, with one exception: the very first invoice is not sent on its own because it is already attached to your welcome email.

You do not need the Stripe portal to find older invoices. The billing page has a Payment History table listing the date, invoice number, amount and status of each payment, with a link to view the invoice and a link to download it as a PDF. See View Invoices if you need them for accounting.

Next steps

Support

If something on the billing page does not behave as described here, write to info@lobbyflight.com. For problems that happen inside the Stripe portal itself — a card Stripe will not accept, or an authentication step from your bank — Stripe's own support at support@stripe.com is closer to the answer.