Apple Pay, Google Pay and other mobile payments platforms may soon arrive on international flights through major airlines like Air Canada, WestJet, Delta and jetBlue.
The Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP), an airline-owned payment network issued by 26 major airlines, has partnered with payment tech company CellPoint Mobile to offer UATP members access to Apple Pay, among other mobile and card-based options.
Any airline that connects to UATP’s Ceptor, a universal link to support “alternative forms of payment,” now has access to CellPoint’s Velocity payment platform and its variety of mobile alternative payment methods (APMs) including Google Pay, Alipay and WeChatPay.
“Because CellPoint Mobile’s transaction acceptance capabilities will be fully integrated with the UATP platform, member airlines will not have to undergo lengthy, resource-intensive integration and development processes with the GDS and reservation systems they currently partner with in order to accept APMs,” said a section of CellPoint Mobile’s June 12th press release.
With all this said, there’s no explicit timeline for when Apple Pay and Google Pay may arrive onboard your preferred airline. While the resource is available, it’s unclear exactly how long it will take individual airlines to roll out the new APMs.
MobileSyrup has reached out to WestJet and Air Canada for further details and will update this post if and when we receive comment.
Still, for the purposes of anticipation: find a full list of UATP airline members here.
Update 6/13/2018: This article previously misstated the amount of issuing airlines with UATP. There are 26, not 18. It has been updated to correct that fact.
Source: CNW
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