Point of sale (POS)
The system used to take payment in person at the moment of sale.
Point of sale (POS) is the combination of hardware and software used to take payment in person at the moment of sale — card terminals, integrated tills, mPOS readers, on-tour devices. Modern POS often handles inventory, customer identification, loyalty and reporting alongside payment. EMV chip-and-PIN and contactless capability come standard in card-present markets.
What it means for travel businesses.
POS shows up in travel at shop counters, airport desks, agent offices and on tour. Each touchpoint needs to feed back into the same booking record so customer history is consistent regardless of where they paid.
A travel agency with high-street counters, on-tour retail and online sales is running three different payment surfaces simultaneously. If they each reconcile separately, finance has three closes to do, three reconciliation patterns to learn, and three sources of error. Bringing them into one booking-level picture is what makes the operation scalable.
The travel businesses that handle POS well treat the in-person payment as just another channel feeding the same booking ledger. The businesses that treat POS as a separate world end up with finance, support and operations teams whose answers depend on which channel the customer used.
How felloh handles it.
felloh keeps card-present POS payments inside the same booking-level picture as web and link-based payments, so reconciliation, refund and reporting work the same way across channels.
The dashboard’s POSC view exposes in-person retail takings against the booking, with the Transactions view recording chip-and-PIN, contactless and mobile-wallet captures alongside online activity. Settlement files reconcile across channels into the same booking-level picture.
For travel groups running counters, on-tour retail and online together, POS stops being its own reconciliation island. The same booking record carries the deposit taken online, the balance taken in shop and the ancillary added on tour.
Related terms.
EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa)
The global standard for chip-and-PIN and contactless card payments.Read termGlossary termContactless payment
A payment made by tapping a card or device on a reader without entering a PIN.Read termGlossary termMobile payments
Payments initiated and authenticated through a mobile device.Read termGlossary termOmnichannel payments
A unified payment experience across web, mobile, agent and in-person channels.Read termGlossary termVirtual terminal
A web-based interface that lets a merchant key card details to take a payment manually.Read termSee how this works around your bookings.
Bring one payment, reporting or cash-position problem. We will show how felloh connects the booking-level money trail behind it.
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