Will Apple Pay or Google Wallet Be Used at the Park?

I'm curious if anyone knows whether or not Cedar Point has/will accept cell phone payment systems. It would be nice to leave the wallet in the hotel room and not have to worry about loose change flying out or losing my wallet.

I've recently worked an amusement park gift shop and have only had a customer pay for something with their phone once. They just held their phone up to the credit card swipe ("terminal" box) and my register prompted me as if they were paying with a credit/debit card. I couldn't believe it worked on such an old, outdated register.

I was curious if Cedar Point was planning on updating some of their retail locations and maybe even restaurants and food stands. Since this technology is relatively new, not all locations accept it--hence my curiosity. Please share if you know anything more. If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about you can watch this:

I'm not sure what their plans are, but with the newer chip-and-pin card standard coming, one would assume that they would have to update their POS systems in the near future. I believe most of Cedar Fair is using Micros terminals, and I'm sure they would love to sell the company new hardware. They make decent stuff for the most part, but I find that it's not as flexible as it could be without shelling out a lot of money to Micros.

Be neat if they did, I'd appreciate the gesture, I'd def be onboard with just now carrying in an ID & my season pass.

Not to go off on a wild tangent too much but that video irked me a tad. NFC has been around awhile, and NFC payments options awhile. Apple didn't really do anything extraordinarily new. Other than maybe a better inteface than Google Wallet IMO, but everything else is basically the same.

Right, Apple hasn't really invented anything. The one thing that's different under the hood (but still not new) is the way they're tokenizing the actual credit card numbers. Tokenization is the process of giving some alternate number to pass around that represents your card, but isn't your card and is otherwise useless outside of the specific system. For example, your profile at Amazon doesn't have your credit number, it has a token. When it's time to charge your card, it uses the token and calls a very closed system which looks up your actual card number and calls the bank to make a charge.

The phone-based systems do something similar, in that your card number isn't stored in the phone, just a token that, when combined with a PIN and/or biometric hash, can call the actual system that holds the card number and have it make the charge.

In theory this would be good for the park to accept these payment methods, but is there enough demand for it for the park to justify the cost of purchasing the equipment to be able to accept these payments?

Personally I don't have a smart phone and I usually use cash in the park. I don't really see the need for 10 million fancy digital ways to pay for everything.

Thabto said:

In theory this would be good for the park to accept these payment methods, but is there enough demand for it for the park to justify the cost of purchasing the equipment to be able to accept these payments?

As Jeff mentioned, all merchants have to make sure their POS terminals are compatible with the upcoming chip-and-pin standard, or else they'll be liable for any fraudulent transactions. So it's a safe bet that during the upgrade, they'll use something that has NFC built-in. So there won't be much of a barrier to entry on the merchant's part. They can easily accept Apple Pay, Google Wallet and so on.

I paid for Coke at the vending machines this year with ApplePay.

thedevariouseffect said:

Not to go off on a wild tangent too much but that video irked me a tad. NFC has been around awhile, and NFC payments options awhile. Apple didn't really do anything extraordinarily new.

I only posted that video to demonstrate for people who aren't familiar with the system. I do get what you're saying though.

^ That's great to hear that you've used it already at the park! Now, there's just the matter of using the Passbook app for the Platinum Passes... I think I'm starting to push this thing too far. ;) haha

Don't the Micros terminals at CP have the mag stripe readers built into the side of the monitor? If so, they would either have to upgrade the entire terminal or maybe Micros could just replace the stripe reader portion for chip and pin. In either case, CP doesn't use the customer operated mag strip readers, so they would have to buy the customer terminals, hopefully with NFC. But, I wonder if there is some reason they want customers handing their card to the clerk rather than swipping themselves?

I'm not working where I can go look at one of the terminals anymore, but I'm pretty sure they have USB ports so you can add a card reader and key pad as a peripheral.

You are correct Jeff - they have the card reader built in, but USB and serial interfaces. Knowing Micros they will still require you to upgrade the entire terminal. Just the way they are.

Several things they could do, yes, most Micros terminals have a mag reader, but also each terminal has several serial and USB connections. All they would need is to add a new NFC reader via a USB port and some software, there is a company in Ann Arbor Mich that is called Flocktag that uses something like this.

http://www.acs.com.hk/en/products/218/acr1251-usb-nfc-reader-ii/

so, it would not be hard to add the hardware with minimal cost, and then you would just need to update the Micro Software, witch i do not know if they can. Also their merchant vendor would need to be able to accept the token given via the NFC.

it Can be done, I do not think the cost is too much, it would be nice, I would love to just carry my ID and my phone! it would also be nice if I could use my scan code off my phone and not the Platinum card cause I've worn out my bar code about 5 times over the years!

"Minimal cost" and "Micros" are rarely spoken in the same sentence.

LOL, you are correct, the hardware would be minimal, the software, would be more of a bend over kinda thing, but i digress, it can be done, for a "cost"

Pete said:

... But, I wonder if there is some reason they want customers handing their card to the clerk rather than swipping themselves?

Do the park employees look at the name and signature like what used to be the standard way retail worked?

Some do. The lady that used to be a manager at Donut Time checked my ID because my card wasn't signed.

Maybe that's why they prefer to actually take the card. I don't know how rules are now but in the '90s Best Buy would not take an unsigned credit card at all because there was some legal loophole that the card was technicaly not valid until signed and the company got burned enough times not getting paid because of it. As a cashier that rule made my life miserable.

You can't prove after the fact whether or not the card was signed. In any case, the new cards requiring presence and a PIN should be less prone to fraud than any signature requirement. No one should ever know your PIN, and it's not possible to use the card without it.

It is possible to use a chip and pin card without the pin, although it is not easy. Here is a research paper on the subject:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oakland10chipbroken.pdf

Hopefully this issue will be patched by the rollout of chip and pin in this country.