Princess Cruises Offers Alipay and WeChat Pay Onboard Ruby Princess

Princess Cruises announced that Chinese guests onboard Ruby Princess have the option to utilize both Alipay and WeChat Pay payment options while shopping in the boutiques. This makes Princess Cruises the first and the only cruise line to offer both Alipay and WeChat Pay payment options onboard a passenger cruise ship in North America.

Alipay and WeChat Pay are China's top-two popular forms of digital payment. Alipay is China's most popular digital wallet service and lifestyle platform and is expanding to in-store, offline payments both inside and outside of China. Alipay's in-store payment service covers over 40 countries and regions across the world. Currently, over 900 million people use the system for digital transactions globally. WeChat Pay is another widely used digital wallet service and mobile payment app in China. WeChat Pay now has 800 million monthly active users worldwide and total volume a year in 2017 was about 6.5 trillion USD.

Princess Cruises is committed to provide amenities to its Chinese guests making payments during international travel more seamless by offering home-away-from-home comforts on select ships including Chinese language menus, Chinese culinary dishes, Chinese onboard hosts, Chinese-language shore excursions. Now, we are pleased to offer our Chinese guests the ability to pay for boutique purchases onboard utilizing the top-two payment methods used by Chinese consumers.

"We have heard from our guests that incorporating Chinese mobile payment services provides a more convenient way to travel," said Gordon Ho, Chief Marketing Officer of Princess Cruises. "As we continue to attract more Chinese outbound travelers to fly overseas and cruise with us, this is another example of our ability to tailor our offerings to the preferences of Chinese travelers. We see this as a great opportunity to make onboard purchases even more convenient as we remain focused to exceed the expectations of our Chinese guests."

Guests first used the convenient digital payment platforms of Alipay and WeChat Pay in The Shops of Princess onboard Majestic Princess, the first luxury cruise ship tailor-made for the Chinese market in 2017 during the cruise ship's summer deployment in Shanghai.