Have you ever thought about just how safe it is to use your credit card on board an airplane? We all know that more and more airlines are moving toward buy-on-board models. That inevitably means that more and more people will begin making purchases onboard aircraft.
We caught up with Ciaran McGowan, IT Director at Retail inMotion, to get some detailed information on how we handle information security with purchases made via our Vector software suite.
Ciaran, first and foremost, sometimes people are concerned about the risks associated with giving out their personal and/or credit card information to crew members in an airline cabin environment. Should people be concerned about making purchases on board?
Ciaran: Absolutely not. Passengers generally provide very little information to cabin crew during their flight. Most of the time, they use a credit card when they make an inflight purchase. The information exchanged in such a transaction is the same as what would be exchanged on the ground – and is just as safe as shopping at your local grocery store. Retail inMotion’s ePOS devices capture credit card details which are immediately encrypted after being read by our machines. The cabin crew cannot access any passenger’s personal information from our ePOS devices.
But isn’t it riskier to make a purchase in flight?
Ciaran: The fact that transactions take place in the cabin of an aircraft does not, for the most part, make them any riskier or safer than those transactions that take place in a department store or at the airport prior to departure. Information that is gathered in the cabin is wrapped in layers of protection that are built into Retail inMotion’s systems. This minimizes the risk that information will be used for any other purpose than what it was originally intended for – namely, for purchasing food, beverages, or duty-free items during a flight.
What do we at Retail inMotion do to make sure that our systems are secure and up-to-date?
Ciaran: Security is of paramount importance to us at Retail inMotion. We devote significant amounts of effort to ensure that the solutions we provide to our customers meet the latest security requirements. We continually maintain adherence to relevant industry standards for security areas, whether ISO27001 or PCI DSS standards — and this adherence is reinforced by annual external audits of our system.
Maintaining such a high level of security can be quite a large task and requires a significant ongoing effort from both our development and security teams. However, we are happy to make this investment and believe that it is essential in order to avoid any breaches of our systems now or in the future.
To learn more about Vector, our end-to-end solution for onboard retail management, click here.