Google Pay Now Accepted At Las Vegas Monorail

Google enters the transportation industry with Google Pay, announcing news on Monday (March 19) that consumers can now pay for tickets for a ride on the Las Vegas Monorail from their mobile devices.

In a blog post, Group Product Manager, Google Pay, Prakash Hariramani said the Las Vegas Monorail is already powered by NXP’s MIFARE contactless technology, enabling it to accept digital payments for tickets. With the new service, Hariramani said customers can purchase their tickets online, save it to Google Pay and use their phone to ride without needing to open the Google Pay app.

“The Las Vegas Monorail is the first transit agency where you can use prepaid tickets or passes with Google Pay instead of a credit or debit card, and it’s coming to more cities soon. Once you’ve saved your ticket, you’ll find info in the app to guide you along your journey — you can see recent transactions, trips or the location of the nearest Monorail station,” wrote Hariramani in the post.

In order for the service to work, users must have the latest version of Google Pay. In order to get a ticket scanned, riders have to hold their phones near the fare gate, noted Hariramani.

In February, Google announced the launch of its new mobile app for viewing and managing payments across platforms, cards and other payment methods, in addition to plans for making the Google Pay capability accessible to all — no matter what device they’re using, no matter where they’re shopping and no matter whether they’ve established an account on a Google property before. The goal? To enable easy, secure payments for anyone, anywhere in the digital or physical world, all using a single account — the holy grail of modern payments.

Google’s VP of Project Management for Payments, Pali Bhat said Google’s latest payments development marks the beginning of the rest of Google’s payments life.

“We have a billion users on Chrome,” Bhat said as one example. “We want every one of those users to be able to pay. Users are already checking out [with merchants] on Chrome, so it will be easy to save their credentials there.”