Google has struck a partnership with Urban Airship, a digital growth company, to launch a mobile wallet function on Google Pay.
This will enable consumers to easily access their boarding passes, event tickets – from live concerts to cinema tickets.
Unlike paper tickets or emailed boarding passes, these mobile wallet tickets unlock new levels of convenience for travellers, with real-time updates (like departure time changes) sent to the lockscreen and personalised one-to-one messaging within the card.
Urban Airship sends real-time updates on flight details, gate changes and other valuable information to 250 million travellers for more than a dozen airlines and major airports annually.
Urban Airship’s Digital Growth Platform and its enterprise-class APIs enable companies to create personalized mobile wallet tickets and boarding passes at massive scale and deliver them through any digital channel, including apps, websites, SMS, email and other emerging platforms.
“As an online exchange with billions of dollars in ticket inventory for concerts, sports and theater events around the globe, we provide a host of solutions that better connect sellers and buyers,” said Doug Kruse, CTO and co-founder, TicketNetwork. “Mobile wallet tickets not only offer greater convenience for attendees and lower ticket distribution costs, they offer a path for post-event re-engagement as we can update tickets with other events they may be interested in attending with an easy path to purchase. Google brings scale and ubiquity to this global proposition, which is truly exciting.”
The Urban Airship platform removes many obstacles from the process of creating, distributing and utilising mobile wallet passes. Adaptive Link technology makes it easy to create and distribute personalized tickets and boarding passes, using a single link to detect the customer’s device and automatically display a pass based on the user’s location. To maximise the value of information presented to customers, Urban Airship’s enterprise-class APIs can directly connect to flight information and reservation systems for real-time ticket updates and alerts. Urban Airship’s platform also supports segmented messaging and real-time automation rules that enable companies to target special offers, including in-flight entertainment and special meals, or concession deals and merchandise for specific showings or locations.
“We help businesses reinvent the customer experience by delivering the right information at the right time on any digital channel, and mobile wallets fill an increasingly critical role in that vision” said Brett Caine, CEO and president of Urban Airship. “Google Pay’s new support for tickets and boarding passes means customers will always have up-to-date information when they need it most – on the go. Urban Airship has the only platform proven to operate at the scale necessary to ensure that this information is delivered quickly, accurately and reliably to hundreds of millions of people.”
“Our goal at Google Pay is to make transactions as seamless and functional as possible for consumers,” said Pali Bhat, VP of Payments Products at Google. “Digitizing users’ wallets and creating rich experiences that leverage Google’s great assets brings us one step closer to that goal.”