BC Ferries customers will have another payment option at terminals by the end of the month through the installation of new pin pads.
Customers will be able to use debit cards to pay for vehicle and foot traffic fees, which will help speed up the processing of tickets.
The tap and pay capability will be available for purchases of $100 dollars or less and Tessa Humphries with the transportation giant said it’s important to offer customers as many payment options as possible.
“We understand that everyone may not have a credit card, we want to offer as many payment options as possible by the end of March. We expect all of our terminals to have pin pads that will be able to accept debit and credit card payments,” said Humphries.
She said, “We know that this has been a pain-point for customers and we’ve been hearing that feedback and we are excited that we will be able to offer it soon.”
Tap and pay debit capabilities provide a fifth payment option for vehicle and foot passengers.
Humphries said this tap and pay debit option will benefit customers using services all over coastal BC.
“We really are improving the customer experience, we’re not creating a bottleneck at the terminals,” said Humphries. “That tap and pay will have a limit of $100 dollars, but we did do some testing beforehand and the testing found that 75 to 80 percent of the transactions came in under that limit.”
“For us, this is really about closing the loop on expanding debit fleetwide and we just wanted to make sure we did it right,” said Humphries.
Existing payment options include credit, cash, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
The payment option is already up and running at the Nanaimo Harbour terminal.
