Chinese
consumers love mobile tech. China now represents the largest business travel
spend in the world, according to GBTA. By the transitive property, I reason
that mobile payments will become the dominant form of payment worldwide. Maybe
it’ll take longer than 2018 to pry the plastic out of U.S. business travelers’
hands. And maybe it’ll take a while for infrastructure to evolve to enable
mobile payments worldwide, but already it has begun. To capture the spending
power of Chinese people traveling abroad, merchants and suppliers around the
world are taking steps to accept the mobile payment platforms that are so
popular in China.
A few
developments from the past few months:
- Luxe Rodeo
Drive Hotel and Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel became the first hotels in Los
Angeles to accept Alipay and WeChat Pay through a partnership with Citcon. The
hotels reported that 1 million Chinese tourists visited L.A. in 2017.
“Accepting these popular forms of payment is an important step in attracting
the $2.9 billion spent by these tourists in California each year,” they said.
- Mobile
point-of-sale facilitator Verifone enabled Alipay acceptance in Europe in 2016,
and early in 2018, Verifone enabled it in select Lacoste U.S. stores,
maneuvering for what it pegged at 3 million Chinese tourists who visit the U.S.
every year.
- Verifone
also enabled Chinese travelers to use their Alipay Mobile Wallets to pay for
taxis in New York and Las Vegas.
- In
November, Eurotrade, which operates 70 or so stores in the Munich airport,
became the first German supplier to accept WeChat Pay, having got Alipay up and
running in 2016. Point-of-sale facilitator Wirecard said the move was meant to
target the 2 million Chinese who travel to Germany every year. It also said
spending by Chinese travelers in Eurotrade’s Munich airport stores increased 92
percent in the first three months in which Alipay was live.
- Alipay
launched in Canada in 2016 and gained 700 Canadian merchants. Alipay then
expanded its capabilities last fall, partnering with mobile payment app SnapPay
so Alipay users could pay at Canadian merchants that accept SnapPay. “We want
to continue offering Chinese consumers visiting Canada the ability to pay as
they would in China,” Alipay North American president Souheil Badran said, “but
we also want to offer Canadian merchants the opportunity to access the Chinese
market.”
As the large
number of Chinese travelers propel wider adoption of mobile payment like Alipay
and WeChat around the world, that could very well prompt faster acceptance in
the U.S., said Ford Motor Co. Asia/Pacific travel manager Christine Liu. As
Citcon CEO Chuck Huang said, “Mobile payment is the new frontier of commerce,
and China is leading this trend.”