What is the Crowne Plaza hotel responsible for procuring and maintaining to connect to the FreedomPay system?

According to the 2025 Crowne Plaza FDD, the hotel is responsible for procuring and maintaining all hardware, software, data communication, and connectivity required to connect to the FreedomPay system. This is at the hotel's sole cost. FreedomPay is the provider of the payment gateway services for Crowne Plaza hotels. IHG facilitates the onboarding, payments, and support, but FreedomPay ultimately provides the payment gateway services.

This means that as a Crowne Plaza franchisee, you will need to budget for and manage the technology infrastructure necessary to integrate with FreedomPay. This includes ensuring that your systems comply with the FreedomPay P2PE Instruction Manual (PIM). Failure to comply with the PIM can result in IHG performing the obligations or mitigating the non-compliance, and charging the hotel reasonable fees.

Furthermore, non-compliance with the PIM or other requirements may lead to the hotel losing benefits described in the PIM. It is also important to procure any necessary PIN keys and KSNs from the acquiring bank to allow pin-debit payment card transactions. The hotel must also configure its eCommerce system to pass through full SKU level data with each transaction, as required by the FreedomPay system. Failure to do so may result in suspension of the hotel's access to the FreedomPay system if the failure is not remedied within thirty days.

Crowne Plaza franchisees should enroll at freedompay.statuspage.io to access FreedomPay system status alerts. The hotel is also responsible for obtaining all consumer consents needed in connection with any service offered by FreedomPay, including third-party services, as required by applicable law. It is important to note that PCI rules prohibit the use of production data (i.e., live PANs) in testing and/or development.