I can assure you that I'm not making it up. I'm 100% sure it was on a layover with Southwest and I'm 80% sure the last time was at the Vegas airport. It was several years ago. Southwest doesn't assign seats, BTW.
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Kroger Begins Accepting Apple Pay at All Ralphs Grocery Stores in California
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I can assure you that I'm not making it up. I'm 100% sure it was on a layover with Southwest and I'm 80% sure the last time was at the Vegas airport. It was several years ago. Southwest doesn't assign seats, BTW.
Pre-pandemic, my travel was about 60% in the U.S. and Canada, 15% in Europe or Asia, and 15% in Africa.
Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
My quote was:I do find it amazing how a person can use their own personal experiences to invalidate other people's experiences. 🤷♀️
Not sure how that ”invalidates other people’s experiences.” Having said that, I would still like an explanation as to how it would work that someone could accept a paper boarding pass and not accept a mobile one.
We are not talking about paper tickets, where the flight coupon needs to be collected, we are talking about boarding passes that are not collected (hence your ability to print multiple of them).
There are three ways boarding passes are reconciled:
- Electronically: A gate reader scans one’s boarding pass and the system automatically does it. In these case there is no difference between a paper boarding pass and a mobile one.
- Semi-manually: A gate agent enters the passenger’s seat number into the computer and the computer track it. Again, in this case, an agent can just as easily read one’s screen as a piece of paper.
- Fully manually: A gate agent works with a printed flight manifest and checks passengers off on the paper as they go to board. Again, no difference between a mobile boarding pass and a paper one.
There are still a few airlines that use exclusively paper boarding passes, but in that case there is no mobile boarding pass and this would not be relevant.
I did not suggest that you were “making it up”, just do not understand how it would have worked. Depending on what you mean by “several years ago”, things may have been very different. Amusingly, I started my day in Las Vegas, and have returned to LA. Since I was bored waiting for my ride, I walked over to Terminal 1 and asked a Southwest agent (at the counter, as I could not get behind security on that side) and asked what the manual and semi-manual processes were and was told they were basically the same as the reserved seat carriers, except instead of using 26A (row 26 seat A), they use A26 (group A, position 26). He could not remember a case in the last years where something like what you described had happened, but said it might have been something from when e-tickets were still new.
Again, not saying it did not happen, just do not understand what the circumstances would have been where a paper boarding pass would have worked, but a mobile one would not have. If it was only enough that you are talking about paper tickets vs. electronic tickets that is a different story (and would have been a long, long time ago).
The former.
The assumption here is that US banks and issuers would do so. I'm not sure that would be true given that the Fair Credit Billing Act and Regulation E have been around for decades now and seem to actually be enforced, or at least nearly as extensively as in, say, the UK.
In any case, it's kind of an academic discussion at this point barring any sort of new government mandate for PIN or something. IMO, PIN would have been nice if only so that we didn't have to wait nearly a decade to semi-reliably tap cards and phones (which BTW was where the rest of the card-using world was already headed by the time we got around to just doing chip).
Here's a story from 2016 that might be something similar.
Southwest Hit By Major Delays After System Outage
Computer system failure strands passengers around the country.
www.travelmarketreport.com
"Last October, 800 Southwest flights were delayed when its check-in system went down, forcing employees to manually issue tickets and boarding passes at airports across the country. Flights were back on track 24 hours later."
That was not what I meant in the post to which you responded.
I meant giving one’s server one’s card, so you were agreeing with my position. If they decided to do it, they would have worked to convince lawmakers to change the law, not just tried to make the change themselves. However, having just re-read the act, I think that issuers could easily argue that entering a valid PIN was just as good as a signature, which would switch the burden of proof to the consumer (as it is now in the UK and many other Chip and PIN countries).
Completely agree there.
Unless the Card Issuers required it (which they were not even willing to do for their lesser desire to enable chip cards), it seems like many stores would still have decided it was not worth the cost of the transition. The reason that many other countries adopted it faster is mostly they had more stores that had not accepted credit card payments at all, so were buying new equipment. Credit Cards were much more widely accepted and used by many more people here than in most other countries. That made the change more costly.
Again, that story is from July of 2016 (or over 6 years ago) and references another incident from the previous October (or about 7 years ago).
Yep, that is about checking in and issuing boarding passes, but not about being unable to handle previously issued mobile boarding passes. Again, even in a manual reconciliation process, there is no difference between reading a paper boarding pass and reading a mobile one on a screen. Your was about people not being able to use their mobile boarding passes and being forced to have them printed. Anyone who had a mobile boarding pass in either example would have been just as able to fly as someone with a paper one.
Ok, well this has been utterly fascinating but I think I'm done contributing. I know what happened to me and I'll continue to spend an extra 5 minutes at a self service kiosk when I get to the airport to get a paper ticket "just in case".
It’s rare, but I encountered twice with different users whose stance was prove it to me otherwise I’m not convinced. And it keeps going with each response. It’s curious because under what kind of context are we in such that we are obligated to prove to them? Are they the boss and we the servants? Lol. *shrug* I’m not new to forums either.
I had an experience with Air Canada at Pearson airport recently where their systems went down and they were able to take printed boarding passes but not mobile passes. Why? I don’t know why. But it was.
That was not what I meant in the post to which you responded.
Yeah, I kinda figured as it's not immediately obvious what "pay at the table" means in the context of this thread (for those just joining, I mean).
I still think it'd be a pretty tough sell to pass liability to the customer when it traditionally hasn't been (regardless of whether PIN's used or not), even in a country such as the US that's ambivalent at best towards consumer rights. It may be different if "zero liability" policies never existed, though, but I suspect the US would still be a pretty heavily cash based society in 2022 if that were the case.
The issue isn't necessarily chip getting adopted or not. It's more that chip and signature / chip and nothing made it a lot easier for certain places to basically...change nothing about how they were running cards (other than what the employee did with your card once you handed it to them). Most people aren't going to hand their phones to a server at a restaurant or the employee at the drive thru window, for instance, so in effect that decision put a ceiling on Apple Pay merchant acceptance and likely significantly delayed its implementation at the places that were eventually going to bother (IMO, anyway).
This also doesn't get into the whole thing about how the industry seemed to just assume contactless wasn't ever going to be a big thing in the US and thus seemingly focused near 100% on EMV/chip cards (effectively outsourcing what little contactless they assumed there was going to be to Apple). Though at least for that, I do kinda get it; after all, we tried contactless back in the late 2000s and that failed miserably, so why put more money on what was already seen as a "failed" technology?
It does not pass liability on to the consumer, it changes the burden of proof if a PIN is used. The argument is that if someone had your PIN you either had to give it to them or write it on your card, so it was your fault. For transactions that did not have a PIN (like some web or phone orders), the burden of proof remained the same.
Completely agree. I will go further and note that was why many places did not bother to quickly switch to chip readers, as all they lost was some fraud protection. At places with low fraud, it did not matter.
Yup. Although I have found that a surprising number of places that take your card away actually have ApplePay support (it just means you have to get up and go to the server station with them). For example, Islands (a mid-tier restaurant group in Southern California) has ApplePay if one asks.
I think that contactless would not have happened were it not for ApplePay. Apple had a real incentive to promote the technology because they would benefit, whereas regular issuers did not really benefit from tap to pay. In addition, as a user, I do not particularly benefit from tap to pay if I still have to carry my card. The benefit to me from ApplePay is that I have 8 cards on my watch and do not need to carry any of them physically with me.
Exactly. The same kind of restaurants that bring the card reader to the table in other countries -even in developing countries such as Mexico- are the ones that still take away people’s cards in the US.
Pay at the table is the former, and yes, extremely rare in the US. Giving your server the card isn’t pay at the table, it’s away from the table because they have to take the card out of your sight, all the way to their station, the kitchen or an office in the back of the restaurant, to charge the card.
Well you don’t have to do it at the airport. Most airlines do offer you the option of a printable boarding pass when you check in online/in app if you don’t want to store and use the digital boarding pass on your phone. Even if you prefer a paper boarding pass, you can print it ahead of time. It’s not strictly necessary to check in at the airport to get a paper boarding pass.
Where are the ones living saying extremely rare? One local place we go takes the card. Every other restaurant we eat at is Kiosk, QR Code or you pay at the register on the way out.
I am a well seasoned traveller and believe me I know all of that! I had a situation where at a layover everyone in line to board that did not have a paper ticket had to get out of line and get a paper ticket during a system outage. That's why I print a paper ticket at home or when I arrive at the airport.
Tap to pay actually cuts significantly into the number of transactions that were traditionally done with cash, so I would say that banks and issuers do have an incentive to--assuming there's the acceptance infrastructure, that is.
Though honestly, given everything that's happened, I do sometimes wonder if we would have been better off if Apple pushed QR instead of NFC back in 2014-2015. Especially since it apparently took a significant death toll for most Americans to start tapping cards and phones in the first place. Then again, it's possible there would still have been significant merchant resistance anyway, even if QR was theoretically easier for them to implement.
Boom. Exactly my experience. Thank you.
Don’t ask me how, but when Air Canada’s system went down in Pearson Airport, those with paper tickets could queue up but those with mobile/digital passes couldn’t be accepted. That was just back in October of this year.
How? What makes Tap to pay any different than other credit card transactions?
I think that Apple made the right choice with NFC. It was skating to where the puck was going. It requires much less battery to operate (it does not need to light up pixels on a screen) and can be built into any size device (again since no screen is needed).
Apple users are strong evangelists for new technology and tend to be desirable customers. Their efforts certainly pushed NFC acceptance here in the United States.
I am not sure it would have been easier in the end. To implement NFC, all one had to do was swap ones payment terminal/reader. To implement QR would have required many locations to add a whole new infrastructure (bar code scanning) as well as a new workflow.
It's still faster than inserting, which reduces friction. Less friction increases the likelihood that one would pay by card instead of cash when given the choice.
I mean, back in 2014, there wasn't really any NFC happening at all, whereas barcode/QR code scanners have been extremely common at stores for decades (or even customer facing displays that customers could scan themselves). Apple could have still pushed QR for the US market to start and rolled out NFC a few years later. It wouldn't have been the first time Apple removed "obsolete" features from their products, after all.
If you have a standalone credit card terminal with no/limited POS integration, then sure. A lot of merchants in the US have very deep levels of integration between their terminals and POS systems, though, and they weren't about to give that up. A consequence of that is that it takes significantly more effort to implement new functionality, which is why it took several years after the supposed 2015 EMV liability shift for chip acceptance to become semi-common, never mind tapping cards and devices.
Right. Just look at most sit down restaurants in the US. They are willing to give up customer security before they give up POS integration. They continue taking cards away while restaurants in the rest of the world gave up POS integration over a decade ago in favor of customer security by switching to standalone wireless card readers. No doubt POS integration is the top priority for US merchants, even above credit card security.
Yea depending on the merchant it can be barely faster than a chip, but it's still more secure than even the chip. I remember when chip first started, the terminals were SLOOOOWWWWW. And I remember when the one Holiday Hair still had the machine that took the imprint of the card lol
POS integration just influenced how quickly places started running the chip, not how places were going to accept your card once they did. If anything, the ability not to have to get wireless terminals likely caused restaurants to accept chip faster than they otherwise would have.
I suspect that if the liability shift date was something like 2017 instead of 2015, the rollout would have been smoother. If nothing else, there'd have been more places accepting it from the start instead of the literally 5 places around here that did in October 2015.