Southwest Airlines revamps inflight retail with MOST
Southwest passengers can now tap to pay with all major cards or digital wallets, further smoothing the transaction flow on board and improving the overall passenger experience
Southwest Airlines has enhanced its onboard sales offering through the deployment of customized onboard product management, bespoke payment hardware, and efficient payment processing from MOST.
“Deploying a solution at the scale of Southwest Airlines and at a rapid pace was a huge accomplishment for our team,” said MOST CEO Jan Blanchard in a July 11 press release. “Adopting the MOST solution makes for smoother exchanges between the airline's flight attendants and customers.”
“As we reimagine our inflight retail process, we needed a solution that eased workloads and improved our data collection, while reducing the time to handle each passenger transaction,” added Ron Freer, Senior Manager Inflight Mobility at Southwest Airlines. “MOST’s agile development process and rapid iterations allowed us to continuously revise the application, ensuring a successful deployment on a very aggressive timeline.”
The MOST solution combines an iPad Mini 6 with a dedicated payment device in an ergonomic package with a single point of charge. Credit or debit card payments can be processed via NFC/Contactless tap (including Apple and Google Pay), Smart Chip, or swipe. The MOST payment gateway handles the transactions during flight and enables an innovative and frequent transmission of offline payments for processing. Data analytics, including product management, can also be relayed in near real-time to back-office systems, thanks to the MOST retail connected management architecture.
