I recently flew on Continental 23 from Dublin to Newark.  This was the first flight where I experienced the new policy by Continental to only accept credit cards for drink purchases.  Funny enough, I was sitting in the first row and was the first passenger to use it – and it broke.  The rest of the flight, the crew had to fall back to cash only.  This was troubling to some as Continental had sent out a global e-mail and twitter announcement that they were only going to take credit cards.  I imagine some people probably skipped the stop at the cash machine!

Luckily I had tweeted asking and Continental had tweeted back that they still accept continental currency.  So, the exclusively accepting credit card thing, wasn’t so exclusive after all.  As a result, I had brought a couple of continental currency coupons and also had plenty of cash.  So, I was relatively unaffected by this occurrence.  Still, it lead me to ponder on my 8 hour flight from Dublin to Newark the use cases of only accepting credit cards.

I asked the flight attendant if they could run tabs.  He said they could, but they generally preferred to just close out after each purchase.  That better be one fast credit card machine.  I also sincerely hope they don’t print a receipt each time.  Thinking about this more, the entire concept just seems inefficient.  Sure, it appears to solve the problem of the flight attendants always having to find change w/ cash purchases.  However, it seems as though the credit card machines just create a new set of problems.

One wonders why you even need a credit card.  Shouldn’t you be able to just “sign for the purchases” like you would at a hotel? When you buy your ticket, you can essentially setup an account and the final bill is paid when your flight is over.  This would be incredibly convenient and would address a majority of passengers.  Those that booked – not on continental.com – could still present a credit card; however, it should only need to be swiped once “to cover incidentals.”  Even better yet, why would this account simply not be setup via the on-screen display?  To take it a step further, why can’t I just put in my drink order via this same display?

In short, having to process a credit card for every on-board purchase seems like a nightmare and I would bet will result in diminished service.