Festival Season: Cutting Queues and Going Cashless

Better engagement all round - reduce queues, increase volumes and profit and everyone wins…

Every year, thousands of fans look forward to their summer festivals, but one element they don’t look forward to is having to stand in line for food and drink. Imagine the frustration when you’re waiting to see Frank Ocean’s only UK show only to be stuck in a queue buying a round for all of your friends - what a disaster!

The nature of the music festival industry is rapidly changing. Consumers are demanding a better all-around festival experience where speed and convenience are key. The exponential rise in boutique festivals illustrates the drive for highly curated, experiential events. Unable to rely simply on headline acts, organisers must provide services that addresses these needs, and the competition is fierce.

With almost all festival-goers bringing a smartphone, the audience demographic is moving towards those who have never known ‘analogue festivals’. Today’s millennials have become ‘au fait’ with mobile transactions and pre-ordering food and drink. And this, in turn, has become the natural progression for a much improved and positive consumer experience, stepping away from the days of loose change and rain-soaked notes.

How can festival vendors implement pre-ordering and cashless payments?

‘Music to the ears’ of festivals vendors is that Lolly recently integrated with the mobile and online pre-order and collect technology, Preoday – to create a digital ordering service designed to reduce queues and maximise customer throughput during busy service periods.

At the time, Peter Moore, CEO at Lolly, said: “We wanted to create a solution that would be perfect for busy hospitality environments, such as grab and go, or cafeterias, where there is only a small serving window to maximise upon each day. Our partnership with Preoday will deliver for these types of provider time and again – creating an end-to-end solution which will help to reduce queues and maximise profit via timely and customised orders”

Vendors will attract more customer if there aren’t lengthy queues obscuring them. Customers will benefit by paying, collecting and returning to their gig to re-join the fun. Festivals will have more punters downloading their apps and better engagement. Everyone wins.

From a security point of view, it’s much safer to have punters walking around festivals and events ordering on their phones, rather than carrying bundles of cash to get them through the long days and nights. This frees up security to focus on real problems, rather than petty thieving.

Preoday has created an offline pay and pick-up model (or pay-on-collection), so if the over stretched festival WiFi is struggling there’s still an option to engage. Orders placed upfront will be sent a unique number or QR code, which can be presented on your screen and scanned in exchange for the drinks.

For this to be genuinely effective at minimising queues, the best approach is for the drinks to be pre-made with the ‘self-serve’ option… queue Lolly.

An added bonus of this feature is, if it is canned or bottled, then it can easily be chilled before collection – a far cry from the lukewarm beer of festivals past. Drink quantities can be accurately judged, meaning little to no waste as the operator knows exactly what volume to have delivered in advance. It’s reliable, dependable and simple, and will allow you to take high volumes of orders and increase your profits.

All that remains is to pre-order your drinks and work out how to deal with the time clashes on all the bands you want to see!