AtYourGate, GOLO, and Mobile Payments Mean Airport Convenience

Air travel these days can be a complex and often unpleasant proposition. Between the bizarre boarding rituals to the “enhanced screening” at security checkpoints, the notion of a pleasant trip almost goes out the window immediately. However, a new combined effort between AtYourGate and GOLO—which produced the oddly-appropriately-named product “AtYourGate powered by GOLO”—may be ready to change that.

The combined effort takes the startup AtYourGate’s operations and pairs them with GOLO, a mobile ordering platform offered up by the Paysafe Group, who filled us in on this development. The group effort’s ultimate result is to allow users to order airport-specific items—sandwiches and other snacks, certain gifts and the like—and have that delivered to most any point in the airport.

AtYourGate powered by GOLO will only be available at the San Diego International Airport for now. Given that it’s the busiest single-runway commercial service airport the US can offer according to reports, it should be sufficient for a shakedown cruise to make sure everything’s working properly and ready for a wider release.

Airport commerce is actually on the rise; word from Micromarket Monitor says that, for US and Canadian airports, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of airport retailing is set to hit almost 20 percent, going from $4.2 billion in 2015 to nearly $10 billion in 2020. With an earlier Paysafe report pointing out that customers prefer apps over mobile sites for online shopping, and prefer online shopping for travel, it makes the combined efforts of AtYourGate and GOLO a natural fit.

Essentially, AtYourGate powered by GOLO is giving air travelers what they want, at least for a very specific value of what they want. While they’d probably prefer faster check-in, or a security process that didn’t involve the unpleasant choices they do today, the ability to get a sandwich brought to your gate right when you land is likely not going to be unwelcome. Yes, it smacks of polishing the brass on the sinking Titanic, but when that’s most of what you have control over, you do what you can.

This combination is an excellent display of what mobile payments can do, and it’s a pretty safe bet that air travelers everywhere will have an interest in this.