Nowadays so many people own smartphone and takes it with them wherever they go and use it for payments at various places like parking, buying something or paying some bills/fees as they find it much more convenient to simply make payments using a mobile phone than paying through a wallet with right change. Therefore mobile applications supporting mobile payments are getting popular especially in the restaurant and hospitality industry. There are so many innovative restaurants and cafes which have already started using new payment functions that made the time-consuming traditional payment procedure redundant. These modern payments using mobile phones make payment faster and more efficient, even during peak hours. 

Thus with the advancement of mobile app development technologies, the smartphones have literally changed into credit/debit cards and the hotels and restaurant were among the first to jump on this bandwagon. Some of the popular hotels such as Hilton and Marriott started offering hotel and restaurant mobile payments to their customers few years ago and they got good response and many benefits in terms of enhanced brand image, new audience and excellent customer service offering. Currently these brands are further expanding their mobile payment services while so many other businesses in hospitality and restaurant industries are rapidly adopting this technology to provide the international level high quality services.

Options for Mobile Payment:-
 

Using Mobile Wallet:

Mobile wallets made it easier for hotels and restaurants to introduce mobile payments to customers. By this way they use existing popular systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay and they don’t have to develop their own apps. They just need to implement a solution which would let them receive mobile payments. This solution is mostly an NFC reader although different mobile wallets have different features and the businesses and customers can choose the most suitable option for them. 

Using Mobile Applications:

Some of the brands go even further and take services of app creator and develop their own mobile apps as mobile wallets don’t support the loyalty programs which have become very important while dealing with customers. Loyalty programs can be integrated with hotel or restaurant mobile payment systems and can enhance the customer engagement and retention and also give business owners a lot of useful information about the customer’s purchasing patterns which is very crucial for creating special offers for them.
 

Challenges in Mobile Payment:-
Although mobile payment can bring many positive changes to any business but it is not very easy to implement it initially as it can bring some difficulties like one that happened with Starbucks restaurant. This company implemented mobile payment and started taking orders from mobiles but it failed miserably to manage the lines of walk-in customers and the customers who made their orders from mobiles. Hence companies should work to prevent customer dissatisfaction by providing high quality service to all of its clients, irrespective of their payment choice. One solution of this problem is the deployment of self-service kiosks in restaurants and hotels.

Conclusion
Due to changing technology and convenience it offers for both customers and the businesses, mobile payment is fast becoming de-facto standard. More and more clients are now making their choice of a hotel or a restaurant based on the mobile payment service availability. Hence the businesses which don’t offer mobile payment will not be preferred and they can lose their position in the market. But the companies should also take the necessary steps to make the mobile payment a success by arranging for to deal with extra rush they can face after introducing mobile payments.