“If you are running an airport or are a travel retailer, comparatively speaking you’re losing out on money if you’re not a Coindrum partner,” said Lukas Decker, the pioneering creator of Coindrum technology, which achieved outstanding results during its three-month trial at Dublin Airport.
For travellers who pass frequently through international airports, the accumulation of coins that cannot be spent on arrival at their destination is a familiar problem. As passengers enter a country in another currency jurisdiction, the change in their pockets becomes dead weight – and often a nuisance in airport security – but an Irish innovation has found a solution, which benefits both passenger and airport. Coindrum self-service machines allow travellers to turn their unwanted currency into travel retail vouchers, enabling them to depart the airport free of superfluous coins and with a duty free item that they love. The first of the inventive systems has now concluded a hugely successful three-month trial period at Dublin Airport, where on average a passenger – travelling for example between Dublin and London – will be carrying €5.62 on their arrival at the airport. “Passengers throw in all of the coins that they are carrying at once – with our technology that can be up to four currencies – and the machine then converts that into a paper voucher, to spend on anything in Dublin’s The Loop duty free,” explained Lukas Decker, CEO of Coindrum. “We also add a further 10% credit to anything they put in, so in Dublin Airport if you put €5 into the machine you receive a €5.50 voucher.”
For airport authorities and travel retailers, Coindrum taps into a valuable source of revenue potential – encouraging essential footfall penetration, and transforming ‘passengers’ into ‘shoppers’. “Everybody who gets a voucher is essentially signing a psychological contract saying ‘I’m going to start spending money in the airport’,” Decker explained. “And we not only send people into stores, but it turns out that on average passengers outspend their voucher by a multiple of three.”
The flexible Coindrum technology has a vast array of applications, and following the initial Dublin Airport trial Decker’s ambition supported by board members including two-time investor Declan Ryan, Co-founder of Ryanair, is to drive the innovation worldwide. Featuring intelligent self-service interface and a PC-base, every transaction the machine completes is synched in real time to an online database, meaning vouchers could also be spent on retailers’ websites to drive traffic to their online platforms. Decker explained that the creative technology has also been partnered with charities, enabling customers to opt to donate their unwanted coins to worthy causes and creating a “one-stop coin solution for the airport environment”.
