You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah.
At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one.
Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choosing a tip amount the bartender is done making your drinks. No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Out of all the festivals, etc, I've been to where they do wristband-based payment instead of accepting cards directly, Avant Gardner / Brooklyn Mirage have the best setup IMO.
> No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Is there normally hassle? In Europe, and I think this generalisation holds in the countries that commonly pay with a card, the terminal is either mounted on the bar facing the customer, or is portable and left in a similar position.
In any case, there's never a pen, receipts mostly go immediately in the bin unless someone is claiming expenses, and the card never leaves the customer's hand.
So it's little different from a contactless bracelet, except I trust Europay-MasterCard-Visa more han a POS supplier.
It helps that there are no tips. If the number on the screen looks reasonable, I don't touch the terminal at all.
The pen thing for signatures is a US phenomenon. Where we have debit cards (contactless and without the need for a PIN even for small amounts in a growing number of countries), they are stuck with a very slow, reluctant transition to PIN-and-chip; something the rest of us did in the late nineties.
The upside is that the US is at this point better at holding on to the principle of being able to use cash everywhere in addition to other payment options; something that is starting to become a problem in Europe.
Most places running newer POS terminals have switched to digital signatures on the screen, which is much nicer... but some bars (especially nightclubs where they don't want bright POS terminal screen shining in your face) still do paper receipts with pen signature, yeah.
Outside of nightlife and restaurants, I almost never deal with paper signatures anymore. Pretty much all retail, etc, does digital signatures and digital receipts, paper receipt upon request.
Its still pretty backwards compared to how most things credit card related work in Europe, but gets the job done and is indeed gradually getting better over here (and, as some of the other posts have mentioned, the saving grace if you don't want to deal with any of this is that cash is almost universally accepted).
At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one.
Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choosing a tip amount the bartender is done making your drinks. No hassle with pens and receipts and handing cards around or any of that.
Out of all the festivals, etc, I've been to where they do wristband-based payment instead of accepting cards directly, Avant Gardner / Brooklyn Mirage have the best setup IMO.
Apparently Billfold is the vendor: https://www.billfoldpos.com/