WDWMagic – the unofficial Disney World blog – announced this week that Apple Pay (and Google Wallet) will be payment options at Disney World (Orlando, FL) today, just in time for Christmas.
Apple announced that we’d be able to use Apple Pay at Disney by Christmas, during their September launch announcement, and it looks like that’s going to happen, albeit just in time for the deadline.
It appears to be part of the rollout of EMV/RFID payments around the park, with tethered POS terminals leading the integration and table side and other mPOS machines being added later. Disneyland doesn’t get the upgrade today, but should get it sometime soon after the new year.
The proliferation of large merchants who accept Apple Pay should provide a tremendous boost to what’s been a lagging Google Wallet — of course it wouldn’t hurt if Google actually updated the Wallet to be more user friendly, instead of less so. From a consumer friendly standpoint, Apple is miles ahead of Google, and the latest Wallet update didn’t prove to remedy the situation at all.
So perhaps we’d all like to ask Santa to bring us Google Wallets with actual clickable links in them and a nice display space like the back of the Passbook pass where consumers can directly access Maps, telephone calling and URL links…