Festival Ready: Open Air Events Scales with Lolly Smart
About Open Air Events
Open Air Events provides bar services to events and festivals across the UK, ranging from small family-run gatherings to large-scale concerts catering to up to 60,000 people. Since launching three years ago, the company has doubled in size year-on-year.
The Decision to Invest in Infrastructure
The team at Open Air Events has always prioritized owning their infrastructure. In late 2017, in anticipation of a busy season, they purchased 10 Lolly Smart units.
Michael Limming, Director at Open Air Events, explains: "The event season runs from May to October, so at the end of last year, we made the decision to buy our own terminals knowing we would have them for the events and that we could programme them to be compatible with the bars. We knew we had to get one step ahead."
The Lolly Smart: Built for Portability
The Lolly Smart is a compact touchscreen till featuring an inbuilt receipt printer, significantly saving counter space in cramped bar environments. Key technical features include:
- Inbuilt Battery: Provides up to seven hours of trading—vital for portability or in the event of a field power failure.
- Secure Backup: Utilises an SD card for local data security.
- Modular Add-ons: Compatible with portable card machines, barcode scanners, cash drawers, and LollyHQ cloud back-office.
Speed of Deployment and Ease of Use
In the fast-paced festival circuit, moving from one event to the next requires rapid setup. The Lolly Smart allows the team to upload programming details via a memory stick, getting multiple units operational in minutes.
"The fact that they are so intuitive and easy to use was a huge selling point," says Limming. "We have all our own trained staff, but should we need to bring in anyone new, we can show them how to operate the till in less than 10 minutes."
Reliability Under Pressure
Speed of service is critical during high-volume events. Open Air Events markets itself as a specialist geared toward delivering these volumes. "Having our own trained staff and equipment means we have designed our proposition to perfectly suit. And we could not do that without the support from Lolly," Limming adds.
Peter Moore, CEO of Lolly, comments:
"The Lolly Smart will come into its own this summer. It's reassuring for the customer to know that if these events experience power surges or electrical issues, the tills can continue operating on battery supply. Here's to an exciting, busy, and prosperous summer of trading ahead!"
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