Lollapalooza music festival, one of the finest North American annual music venues, is reported to launch a new cashless system this year, making it possible for attendees to buy merchandise, food and drinks at festival vendors entirely via their wristbands.
According to Billboard, this claims to be the first effort from a major U.S. music festival to use radio frequency identification (or RFID)-enabled wristbands for payments.
Over the next weeks, Chicago music festival will begin sending concertgoers bracelets that can be linked to credit card information, adding a PIN number. At the festival, all the vendors will have a point-of-sale systems, so the user taps a bracelet against a technology-enables pad and types in a PIN code to pay for items. The payment is then automatically applied to a credit or debit card. As for the cash and credit cards, they will still be available for use; although, advantages of the full cashless pay system are obvious.
“It’s a way to streamline the experience for fans,” says Patrick Dentler, marketing director at C3 Presents, which produces Lollapalooza. “We hopes this means that fans will spend more time in front of the stage and less time in line”.
Mashable reports that the wristband is waterproof — and if the Internet goes down, as it frequently does at festivals, the vendor tablets will store the purchase and upload it once service returns.
Lollapalooza is not the first music festival in 2014 to use fully cashless pay system, however, it is the most popular and attended one.
“We feel like not only will that be big for us, but it will end up spreading across some of the other major festivals,” says Patrick Dentler.
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