TomorrowWorld

TomorrowWorld EDM Festival, Chattahoochee Hills, GA

TomorrowWorld Electronic Music Festival

Welcome to one of the biggest electronic music festivals in the world. TomorrowWorld fills an area of Chattahoochee Hills, GA with 9 elaborately decorated, fantasy-inspired stages, vast camping grounds, interesting shops and multi-cultural cuisine. Imported from Belgium and based on their Tomorrowland festival, over 160,000 people camp and dance for the 3 day festival.

Event Details

Event Needs

A challenge was presented to American Metro. Can you create a credit card network in an area with sketchy cellular coverage and spread out enough where running ethernet cable prohibitive. Ticket booths at each of the entrances need to be able to keep up with the large number of people entering each day.

Another component is the several upscale bar areas that require a system capable of saving and recalling food and drink orders. The system also needs to be able to pre-authorize credit cards to secure large purchases. It should be easy to learn for bartenders who are used to using touch screen apps.

The American Metro Solution

The first part of the solution was to equip each ticket booth with Exadigm XD2000 credit card swipers. These mobile devices run on a cellular network for live processing, but also have a back up mode. When in Store and Forward mode, the terminal will hold the encrypted credit card data and send it for approval as soon as a network connection is reestablished.

The bar areas were given Sam4s SPS2000 touch screen terminals. These terminals were designed for the hospitality industry and fit each of the criteria given. The ability to store and recall checks, track pre-authorization amounts and followed a very familiar screen layout to cashiers.

Satisfaction Summary

American Metro was on hand to do the setup and networking of the bar locations, did price change and trouble shooting throughout the event and help in running reports. The Exadigms worked as expected. The one caveat of the store and forward method of running transactions is that when cards are declined, there is no notification until the card is processed. That meant that approximately 6% of credit card transactions did not get processed. To recuperate some of that cost, the American Metro staff would try re-running those transactions over the next few days in the hope that funds would become available.