The Leisure Pass Operating System (LPOS) has been introduced as the new management platform for the Gothenburg City Card following a competitive tender process run by Göteborg & Co, the organisation responsible for promoting the city as a tourism destination.
LPOS, which operates the Leisure Pass Group’s successful sightseeing cards London Pass, Paris Pass and Berlin Pass, as well as a number of cards in other cities including Copenhagen, Stockholm, Prague and Antwerp, was chosen to provide a seamless system handling all aspects of managing and administering the Gothenburg City Card.
Before moving to the LPOS platform the Gothenburg City Card used two separate systems - one for managing sales and distribution, another for administering customer usage. With card sales growing to around 50,000 annually, the manual processes involved became difficult to manage - in particular stock logistics and calculating payments to featured attractions.
Following a competitive tender process, in December 2013 the Leisure Pass Group was awarded the contract to provide a system tailor-made to Göteborg & Co’s requirements.
The Gothenburg City Card includes use of public transport, parking, entry to attractions and sightseeing tours, so Leisure Pass Group has incorporated a barcode into the card design. This is simply scanned at the point of use to verify the card’s validity, with participating attractions provided with USB barcode readers which link to an LPOS application on a PC, or an android smartphone with the LPOS application loaded.
Financial control has been made smoother with the inclusion in the system build of a bespoke set-up allowing agent orders to be sent directly to Göteborg & Co’s financial software.
The fully-automated LPOS system provides a range of benefits to city pass operators, managing the entire life-cycle of each pass sold, from purchase to usage to invoicing. This provides operators with best-in-class stock control and the ability to instantly ‘hotlist’ cards reported lost or stolen, as well as accurate tracking of how each card is utilised. From here operators can chart patterns in customer behaviour and compare profitability by product type and even by nationality.
Easy to use, the system provides quick, cashless transactions at each featured attraction via card-readers which dial-in automatically to LPOS - creating a convenient experience for the customer and reducing paperwork for attraction operators. Currently, LPOS processes more than 5.5 million visits to attractions every year.
Gothenburg City Card project manager Karin Åman commented: “We were looking for a bespoke system to handle both attractions entries and card sales and distribution. The Leisure Pass Operating System met all our requirements and we also received very good references from other cities using the system. We have been working closely with the Leisure Pass Group since the contract was awarded and are delighted to now launch the next generation version of the Gothenburg City Card.”
Contact Neil Wallace for more information