Cornwall tourist attraction the Eden Project has upgraded its mobile ticketing system after an earlier phase of the project ended up creating more work for box office staff.

The organisation has added an electronic wallet payment system so customers no longer have to contact a call centre, but can conduct the entire transaction using their mobile phone.

Under the old system, which was introduced to cut costs and reduce queueing, customers needed to talk to a box office agent to authorise payment for the e-ticket, sent as a barcode to their mobile phone.

By incorporating an electronic wallet, the manual overhead has been cut, says Eden Project IT manager Nick Argent.

‘We had to pull advertising as we did not have the box office set-up to cope with demand,’ he said. ‘People saw the queues on busy days, which increased the number of calls to the box office for the fast-track system.’

The partnership with Swiftpass and LUUP means visitors with a mobile can buy the ticket by text, initiating a payment from their account. A barcode will then be sent automatically to their phone.

When a non-account holder texts the code to purchase a ticket, they are contacted by the LUUP call centre to register.

The scheme also has green implications.

‘On an environmental basis, we hope the majority of tickets will be paperless,’ said Argent.