Galtres Parkland Festival introduces Cashless technology to this year’s event.

A ground-breaking North Yorkshire festival will next month become the UK’s first independent festival to go 100% cashless using RFID card devices.

Galtres Parklands Festival, which takes place at Duncombe Park, Helmsley, over the August Bank Holiday Weekend, has teamed up with technology partner IVS to upgrade the event’s previous paper-voucher system to an electronic closed-loop payment facility.

The innovative system will allow customers to load funds onto a festival-branded ‘G-CARD’ which can be used to purchase food, drinks, rides, merchandise and other items across the 10,000 capacity Duncombe Park festival site. The cards can be pre-loaded before the event and customer service booths on-site will provide loading, top-up and balance-checking services.

“Our paper voucher system has worked well for many years,” explained the festival’s financial mananger Jenny Elliott, “- it reduced cash transactions and so helped reduce the risk of crime and fraud. This is the natural next step for a festival which has always led the way. The IVS system will enable us to roll out cashless and contactless payment for all transactions throughout the festival weekend, and it’s a very exciting offering to our customers.”

This summer has already seen IVS deliver their in-site contactless solutions to such major events as The Isle Of Wight, T In The Park, Barclaycard British Summer Time in Hyde Park, Goodwood Festival Of Speed and the UEFA Champions League Final at Wembley.

In a groundbreaking development for the festival industry, commercial deployments are now confirmed at a diverse range of upcoming, organically-grown UK events.

Galtres Parklands Festival director James Houston said: “As well as this being a neat payment solution, the IVS system offers opportunities for us in access control, social media-integration, and countless other benefits such as tracking lost children. We look forward to developing these features in future years.”

The development coincides with a move by Galtres to a stunning new location overlooking the North York Moors. Headliners The Stranglers, Maximo Park, The Undertones, Reef, and Lloyd Cole are among 130 bands playing on seven stages at Duncombe Park, Helmsley.

Claire O’Neill, general manager of the Association Of Independent Festivals (AIF), says: “Promoting more efficiently managed events and improving customer experience have always been priorities for the AIF. We can see that contactless technology holds great promise for both and we are very encouraged that independent festivals are now starting to adopt it. We look forward to working with IVS to further this exciting process and help enable our members to benefit to the fullest possible extent."

Paul Pike, IVS director, comments: “Whilst we are very proud of our work with our large event clients, it has long been our ambition to extend the benefits of this technology to the independent sector, where we feel it has the potential to make an even greater difference to organisers. We consider it a great accomplishment to have made our systems sufficiently cost-effective to achieve this aim. And this is just the beginning”.