Festival Cruïlla
Festival Cruïlla

Festival Cruïlla

Festival Cruïlla: technology and expertise for a festival with no distancing.

Cruïlla Festival set up an unprecedented operation for the return of events amid the Covid pandemic, with the WeezPay cashless system and WeezAccess access control.

In action
  • 100% online cashless top-up
  • 5,000 Covid tests/hour
  • 350 mobile points of sale
  • 150 access control terminals

In July 2021, 50,000 peo­ple danced at the three-day fes­ti­val in Spain, with no restric­tions on move­ment or social dis­tanc­ing rules. The seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble was made pos­si­ble at Fes­ti­val Cruïl­la thanks to the imple­men­ta­tion of a strict admis­sion sys­tem. Our tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions sup­port­ed the event for the var­i­ous cru­cial aspects of the oper­a­tion, includ­ing online pay­ment for anti­gen tests, access con­trol, ver­i­fi­ca­tion of test results, and cash­less pay­ments at the bars & cater­ing points.

Managing 50,000 attendees in the context of Covid-19

Payment for antigen tests and NFC access control

Our tech­ni­cal team devel­oped an inno­v­a­tive and unique solu­tion for the needs of this spe­cial edi­tion of Fes­ti­val Cruïl­la: a mod­ule inte­grat­ing cash­less top-ups, as well as the book­ing and pay­ment for anti­gen tests, which atten­dees had to car­ry out each day of the festival.Before the anti­gen tests were con­duct­ed, each attendee had to present their tick­et to prove its valid­i­ty and their iden­ti­ty. Each attendee was then giv­en a wrist­band with an NFC chip linked to their tick­et and per­son­al cash­less account. The com­pa­ny in charge of car­ry­ing out the tests were able to send the results of each test to Weezevent via an API. The wrist­band there­fore had three func­tions; a tick­et, proof of a neg­a­tive anti­gen test, and means to make cash­less pay­ments.

At the festival’s access points the infor­ma­tion con­tained in the wrist­band was checked using the NFC chip and the iden­ti­ty of the attendee was ver­i­fied.

Discov­er the oper­a­tion in détail

A cashless account adapted to all circumstances

The Weez­Pay tool allows for a high­ly flex­i­ble con­fig­u­ra­tion of cash­less accounts. At Fes­ti­val Cruïl­la, for exam­ple, the option to asso­ciate sev­er­al tick­ets with a sin­gle cash­less account was imple­ment­ed. This sys­tem is wide­ly used by fam­i­lies to man­age their con­sump­tion at events, and was par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful at this fes­ti­val in enabling pay­ments for tests for whole fam­i­lies with no need to cre­ate an account for minors (from 7 to 16 years old). This also allowed for the man­age­ment of tick­ets for each day of the fes­ti­val as well as pay­ments for anti­gen tests from a sin­gle cash­less account.

In addi­tion, the infor­ma­tion on cash­less accounts facil­i­tat­ed the check­ing of minors’ ages at all bars through a sim­ple process: when a minor’s wrist­band was scanned at the bar the sys­tem imme­di­ate­ly noti­fied the oper­a­tor and made it impos­si­ble to sell them alco­holic drinks.

100% online cashless top-ups

Cash­less top-ups were opened before the event, togeth­er with pay­ments for the anti­gen test. Dur­ing the fes­ti­val there were no phys­i­cal top-up points, with all top-ups made online. This sys­tem, which avoid­ed unnec­es­sary con­tact, trav­el and queu­ing, was well received by the pub­lic and top-ups went smooth­ly.

Dur­ing the event, auto­mat­ic top-ups were acti­vat­ed for those who want­ed them. This meant that when the pre­vi­ous­ly topped-up bal­ance was spent, €20 was auto­mat­i­cal­ly topped up to the attendee’s cash­less account, with­out the attendee need­ing to do any­thing. This option was lim­it­ed to a total of 5 top-ups, and required man­u­al reac­ti­va­tion by the attendee to restart the auto­mat­ic top-up cycle.

Use of key loyalty features

Brand activations

Brands such as Jäger­meis­ter, Coca-Cola, City Scout, DKV and Natur­gy were able to car­ry out brand acti­va­tions quick­ly and eas­i­ly. The Weez­Pay cash­less sys­tem made the process sim­ple: each brand had a cash­less ter­mi­nal on which it could select a free prod­uct to give to an attendee. Each of these free­bies was then record­ed and doc­u­ment­ed in reports from the back office.

Building loyalty among 2020 ticket holders

The organ­is­ers also want­ed to thank the atten­dees who had bought their tick­ets for the 2020 edi­tion and who did not ask for a refund when the post­pone­ment was announced, reward­ing their loy­al­ty with an offer of free drinks. Through Weez­Pay, this was eas­i­ly done by allo­cat­ing these free drinks to the cor­re­spond­ing atten­dees who could redeem them direct­ly via their cash­less wrist­band.

Returnable glasses

In most of the bars, the option to buy and return reusable glass­es was not acti­vat­ed due to the use of biodegrad­able cups. How­ev­er, it was decid­ed that they would be used in the VIP area, where atten­dees could get a refund on their cash­less account for returned emp­ty glass­es.

Monitoring in real time … and on large screens

Weezevent pro­vid­ed dash­boards to allow the organ­is­ers to mon­i­tor the var­i­ous key data points on the event in real time, includ­ing access num­bers, top-ups, the top 10 bars in terms of sales, the most pur­chased prod­ucts, and so on.

The organ­is­ers ded­i­cat­ed a room for this pur­pose, the Data Con­trol Cen­tre, where they installed large screens to dis­play these con­trol pan­els. In the era of data analy­sis the ini­tia­tive was a great suc­cess!

Festival Cruïlla

Hav­ing the sup­port of Weezevent is a guar­an­tee of reli­a­bil­i­ty in the deploy­ment of cash­less tech­nol­o­gy, for an edi­tion where it was vital that the entire process of book­ing tests, screen­ing, access and pay­ment worked smooth­ly and secure­ly.

David Rocasalbas CTO Festival Cruïlla Barcelona

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