Cloudbeds turns on card terminals in 15 more countries, Mexico included

Cloudbeds has switched on in-person card payments in 15 more countries. If you run a property in one of them, you can now take a tap, dip, chip or swipe through Cloudbeds instead of a separate card machine that reconciles by hand at the end of the night.

The 15 markets are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The terminal is the Stripe Reader S710, which Cloudbeds calls its newest device.

Mexico is the one to notice

Until this update, Cloudbeds' own setup documentation said plainly that no terminals were available in Mexico and that properties there were limited to card-not-present transactions. Mexico is now on the list. For Mexican hotels and hostels that have been taking card numbers over the phone or through a payment link and absorbing the higher dispute risk that comes with it, that is the real change here.

Japan is the other notable addition, and the only market on the list outside Europe and Latin America.

What you need before it works

The requirements have not changed with the country expansion, and they are worth checking before you order hardware.

Cloudbeds Payments has to be enabled on your property, and the Accept Card-Present Payments tab has to be showing in your account. If it is not there, that is a support ticket rather than a setting you can flip.

The terminal and the computer running Cloudbeds must sit on the same network. The WiFi has to be WPA-Personal or WPA2-Personal with a password. Enterprise networks and open guest networks are not supported, which rules out plugging the terminal into the same SSID your guests use at a lot of properties. Cloudbeds also recommends pointing the network at Google DNS to avoid transaction errors.

German properties get one piece of good news in the documentation: because Cloudbeds terminals are not standalone devices, they do not need to be registered with the tax office.

Two things the announcement does not tell you

Cloudbeds has not published the cost. There is no per-transaction rate, no hardware price and no plan requirement in the update or in the help centre article it links to, only an invitation to contact the sales team for package details. If you are budgeting for this, you are making a phone call.

The documentation is also behind the hardware. The setup guide that the product update points to still describes the BBPOS WisePOS E, not the S710 named in the announcement. Whoever on your team follows that guide may be looking at pictures of a different device. Expect to improvise, or ask support for current instructions.

One note on timing. Cloudbeds labels its product updates with a month and no day, and the detail links go into help centre articles rather than dated release notes. So the honest position is that this landed somewhere in October 2026. It was not on the product update page when we covered the month's smaller changes on 26 October.

What to do about it

If you are in one of the 15 markets and currently running a standalone card machine, this is worth pricing. The gain is not the tap itself, it is that the payment lands against the folio without anyone typing it in twice, and that your end-of-day reconciliation stops being a comparison between two systems.

If you are in Mexico, the gain is bigger than convenience. Moving from card-not-present to card-present changes who carries the risk on a disputed transaction.

Ask about the fee before you commit. A terminal that posts straight to the folio is only a saving if the processing rate is not quietly worse than what your current provider charges.