TL;DR - Depends, on your pre-paid card, the hotel, and how you book the hotel.

There are a few different charges to consider here:


Pre-payment of the room at/shortly after booking
Holding the room on a flexible booking
Deposit at checkin
Room charge, meals, drinks, extras etc at checkout


With many OTAs and hotel websites, if you make a non flexible booking, or some kinds of flexible bookings, they will charge your card for the room rate during the booking process. With some others, they'll send your card details through to the hotel, who'll put it through their tills later. (Maybe that day, maybe during a weekly sweep). In order for this pre-payment to go through, your card will need to support offline / cardholder-not-present transactions. As long as your card advertises itself as "suitable for online shopping" or similar, and as long as the card issuer doesn't block travel booking, you should be fine. Speak to your card issuer to be sure.

Alternately, when reserving the room, you might opt for a flexible rate where you pay at checkout, with no pre-payment. This is typically offered on the hotel's own site, and some OTAs. They will normally ask for a credit card to "hold" the reservation, which would be charged in the event of a no-show, but as long as you turn up as planned the card won't be charged. These rates are normally a bit more expensive than non-flexible pre-paid ones, but this style of booking should be fine on any card.

At checkin, most hotels (but not all) will want to take some sort of deposit. Typically this covers any unpaid parts of the room rate, along with expected spend in the restaurant / bar / etc. The details taken would also be used in the event of damage. If you've pre-paid the room and don't plan to run up extras in the hotel, many hotels would let you not leave a deposit, but not all. Very small hotels may take a look at you, decide you look fine, and tell you to pay everything at checkout. Some hotels may want to take something no matter what.

For the deposit, this is normally done as a pre-authorisation. Not all pre-paid card support this, which would be a problem. Some pre-paid cards do support it, but badly, and might take a week or so to release the reserved funds, which could be a problem. Check with your card issuer about this. Alternately, many hotels which require a deposit will be willing to take a cash deposit, but they may well want a larger cash deposit than they'd normally authorise on a credit card. (They can't charge extras to the card later for example). Expect to leave a hefty chunk of cash as a deposit, expect checkin to take a while, expect several people to count the money, bills may be checked for counterfeits, and expect a receipt at the end. Speak with the hotel first to see if they need a deposit, and if they take cash ones. As a datapoint, I once got stuck in a checkin queue behind someone doing a cash deposit, he was asked to leave something like 4 nights room rate as a deposit on a 2 night stay.

Finally, we have settling up the bill at the end. If you pre-paid, and didn't eat there, you could well find there's nothing to pay, or just a few dollars / pounds / euros in city taxes. Alternately, if you didn't pre pay (or they didn't take it), ate in the restaurant lots etc, you could have a decent amount to pay here. You'll be present, so any card which supports in-person transactions will be fine for this. Well, as long as you have the money on it for the bill that is! If you did a cash deposit, you should get the choice between taking the bill off that and getting the remainder, or getting the whole deposit back in cash and paying on a card.

Oh, one more possibility - charges not noticed at checkout. Maybe you forgot to tell them about the minibar charges, maybe that morning's breakfast didn't go through, something like that. If you used a credit card for the deposit, expect them to charge it to that later when they notice. If you paid cash, expect to get a bill in the mail some time later.

Can it be done - sure! Can it be done at one specific hotel with one particular kind of pre-paid card on one specific rate booked one specific way? Depends...

Can you book hotels on a prepaid credit card worldwide?
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