Cashless payments on AZUR Air’s airplanes

Objective

Paying by card has become an essential part of our everyday life. Virtually all businesses today offer paying by card—including airlines. This is not surprising as on-board selling is highly demanded. With that, the range of products is not limited to snacks or drinks: passengers can buy watches, headsets, portable charges, and lots of other goods. What is important is to offer alternative payment options beside cash as a passenger may have no paper money with them during a flight.

Aero Trade LLC, one of the leading companies in the air passenger catering market, reached out MST with a request to integrate a cashless payment system to be available on AZUR Air’s airplanes. Following the exhaustive problem discussion, we presented a solution to satisfy all the customer’s demands and expectations. To implement the project, MST engineers had to carefully crawl through the regulatory framework, design flight attendant script, create a flight attendant training program, and revise the JoinPOS software. It is software performance that preconditions the overall project performance so we omit organizational details on purpose and get to technical aspects.

Solution

The most challenging problem inhibiting using on-board cashless payment systems is no Internet connection in the sky. If a plane had the communications equipment installed, the only thing required would be equipping the liner with classic POS devices. However, further airplane equipping implies heavy investing not possible in the nearest future. In view of that, the only fruitful and legit solution will be an offline transaction-based system. Basically, such a solution means transactions made during a flight are accumulated in a POS terminal and then go online when a plane lands and connects to the network.

However, a passenger may have insufficient funds on their account and this cannot be known during a flight, but the airline is the part that suffers the losses a priori as the selling service is provided on-board. To remedy such a situation, the system registers a rejected transaction and then automatically tries to charge the amount from the recorded card. If those attempts do not result in a successful charge within a month (e.g. funds are still insufficient), the card will be registered in the blacklist of cards not accepted on board unless the pass holding that card pays off their debt to the airline.

Afterword

MST has successfully and time-efficiently realized the project and passengers of AZUR Air now can pay with MasterCard, VISA, and MIR cards while flying. Also, within the framework of our cooperation with Aero Trade, our specialists develop a cloud-based account for catering companies JoinPAY «Aero».

That cloud-based account allows a catering company to:

• arrange product accounting;
• see all transactions (cash and cashless);
• see earnings by product, flight, board, or flight attendant;
• export detailed reports;
• do lots more.

All the above features make our solution a versatile tool combining payment functions and analytical instruments. By implementing our solution, companies will be able to increase sales by offering new payment options, manage costs more efficiently, and deeply analyze the workflow.

Project participants