Cashless Festival?

[glastolover]

Hi all... we are returning to Latitude for the first time in 9 years (!!), now with kids aged 12 and 14.

Looking through the info on the official site, it says that all food and drink stalls are cashless only... which I guess means everything is card or mobile app payment only... is that definitely right?!

I guess it makes sense if it works, but having heard of issues at Glastonbury with cashless network not working, just wondering if anyone can confirm... was it cashless last year? Did it work? Is anyone taking cash just in case?! 

[glimmers_of_hope]

I remember it being cashless last year and it worked fine. I'll take a bit of cash this year just in case. I was at glasto this year and yes cashless there was patchy. Its a much bigger site with many more bars and vendors though so I think it will be fine at latitude. 

[glastolover]

OK... it really needs to work, as you can't take enough cash to cover for it not working really!!! I guess take some cash for emergency and cross fingers that it is OK... 

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Edited July 10, 2022 by glastolover

[incident]

The issue at Glastonbury was that because every trader uses their own card payment devices, most of which used 4G data to connect, several traders were caught out by their mobile network being worse than usual. The stalls using EE were fine, but all the other networks were patchy across the weekend.

At Latitude and other FR/LN festivals last year, traders were required to use payment terminals issued by the festival (presumably so that FR/LN could take a cut and/or gather data). As part of this, FR provided WiFi coverage for these devices. The coverage did break a couple times during the festival, especially early on with stalls reverting to cash, but for the most part it was fine.

Not entirely happy about FR being able to track a person's entire purchase history across the weekend though.

[glastolover]

Wow. Good insight.

No, I think the whole thing is quite dodgy tbh. I mean, fair enough to offer the convenience, but refusing to take cash is wrong. Very wrong. I worry that a lot of people will just end up spending waaaaaay more than they mean to when it is just the flash of the card rather than paying from a stash of cash that you can monitor to see how much you have spent...