In hopes of speeding up digital payments, airlines Virgin America and JetBlue Airways Corp. have added mobile checkout features recently.

Virgin added Visa Checkout to its website at the end of February, and smartphone conversion rates subsequently increased, says Stuart Dinnis, director of loyalty at Virgin.

Visa Checkout is a button consumers can hit for a faster checkout. A consumer first must create a Visa Checkout account that saves her information including default credit card and shipping address. Once the account is set up, when a consumer is on the product page of a site a picture of her saved Visa card will appear on the screen next to the Visa checkout button. Once she clicks on the button she is prompted to log in to her account, and confirm her details in order to complete the transaction.

Virgin Airlines has a responsive design website, meaning it adapts the look of a website to the device the consumer is using. That means that once it added the checkout button to its site, that button is accessible regardless of the device the consumer is using. Virgin America does not have an app.

Dinnis described the campaign as successful and customer take-up as excellent, though he declined to say how many consumers used it. Customers who used Visa Checkout spent 34% more than the average website customer, Dinnis says. Virgin also experienced three-times the revenue it projected for the campaign from the addition of the Visa Checkout option, he says.

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However, Dinnis says that while consumers increasingly visit Virgin’s website on a smartphone, most still use a desktop to purchase.

According to SITA’s “The Passenger IT Trends survey” results, 26% of travelers booked their last flight on a mobile device. The survey results were based on 5,871 global respondents who traveled between December 2014 and March 2015. SITA is an information technology company for air travel. Booking travel through tablets is growing faster than through smartphones, but respondents prefer to book via a browser on a tablet and via a mobile app on smartphones, according to the survey.

Integrating Visa Checkout into a website takes four to six weeks and costs between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Sam Shrauger, Visa’s senior vice president of digital solutions.

JetBlue, meanwhile, is beginning to offer customers the option of paying with Apple Pay on their iPhone. By the end of June, all of JetBlue’s aircrafts will have Apple Pay capability.

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3,500 JetBlue crew members will have Apple iPad minis equipped with a Near Field Communication chip that communicates wirelessly with the NFC chip on an Apple Pay-enabled iPhone. Since NFC is a radio signal  it does not need Wi-Fi to work and can work with an iPhone that is in Airplane mode, says a JetBlue spokesman. The transactions are captured on the iPad minis and processed upon landing, he says.

The payment feature is used for premium purchases, including beer and wine, seat upgrades, headsets and pillows, he says.

Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360April

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