8 reasons to use a cashless RFID solution at your next beer festival

Humans have been brewing and sampling beer in various forms for nearly 7000 years, but in recent times the practice has undergone an incredible renaissance with over 2000 breweries now operating in the UK alone. This is great news for beer enthusiasts and novices alike, as beer and craft beer festivals are now one of the fastest-growing markets in the events industry.

In any fast-growing industry, innovation is the name of the game. Traditionally, beer festival organisers have issued plastic tokens to be exchanged for a punter’s tipple of choice at a vendor’s stand, thus reducing the amount of cash circulating at events and standardising pricing.

Tokens, however, are an unwieldy method of exchange. After queuing to enter the venue, nobody wants to wait in line again for that hotly-anticipated stout or IPA, and then dig around in a pocket for an easily-lost plastic token.

But fear not, Event Genius Pay, our award-winning cashless POS, can help:

1. Speedy queues: Our system gives beer festival-goers the ability to pre-purchase vouchers when buying their ticket. Once inside the festival they don’t have another top-up queue to suffer through before the sampling begins. After credit is loaded onto an RFID enabled wristband, customers can pay in less than a second with a tap of their wrist, keeping queuing to a minimum.

2. Generate pre-event revenue: Pre-event voucher sales can give beer festival organisers an indication as to whether their event is going to hit certain sales targets or whether they may need to invest in additional marketing. Customers purchasing vouchers online at the point of ticket purchase also reduce queues for top-ups inside the festival and the number of staff needed to service top-up points.

3. Faster reconciliation: Beer tokens present a distinct weakness when compared with RFID as they are a physical object, liable to get lost or damaged. Furthermore, if your beer festival hosts 50 different vendors and there are 10,000 bits of plastic floating around post-event, this can make reconciliation a tricky and time-consuming task.

Our RFID wristbands or cards remove this labour-intensive process by automatically creating sales reports for every bar, vendor and device in use, making end-of-event reconciliation a breeze.

4. Reduced errors, costs & fraud: As every transaction is processed digitally using one of our devices, there is no opportunity for staff handling errors or theft of tokens. At beer festivals using token systems, staff have occasionally been known to sell tokens back at a reduced cost to punters or friends or simply misplace them - with Event Genius Pay this risk factor is eliminated.

5. Opportunities for sponsorship: The data generated by Event Genius Pay can also provide supporting evidence when pitching for new sponsorships from brands that may wish to market to your attendees. Walking into a meeting with a robust report on the success of a particular product is excellent proof that your event’s demographic matches a brand’s target audience.

6. Efficient top-ups: The Event Genius POS solution is supported by self-service or staffed top-up points to allow customers to refresh their RFID balance at multiple points around the event. Guests can also top-up via their mobile phone if they prefer.*

This is a preferable situation to one centralised token distribution point (often with a large queue) or several token distribution sites which multiply both the number of staff needed to manage them and opportunities for loss.

*A stable internet connection is required for this feature.

7. Better data to improve future planning & pricing: Use rich data from all vendors, bars and top-up locations to set accurate pitch fees, via tiers or a percentage of sales, and implement better event planning at future events.

8. Transparency with vendors: RFID provides an extremely transparent dataset to eliminate disagreements between organisers and vendors. Event Genius Pay reports show the exact sales figures for each vendor individually, bringing clarity to everyone involved when the event ends.

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Cashless beer festivals have been the norm for some time now, but Event Genius Pay can take the cashless concept to a whole new level. If you’d like to know more about revolutionising your next beer festival, please get in touch via email or to keep up to date with our latest news please subscribe by entering your email address below:

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