Wallet passes

As well as the ticket in the confirmation email, your visitor can put their ticket into Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. For many people that is the only place where they can still find it at the door. This article explains what those wallets are, why a pass works better than a pdf, and what has to be set up once before the buttons work.

What is a wallet?

Every modern phone has a built-in wallet app. On an iPhone it is called Wallet (the icon with the coloured cards), on an Android device Google Wallet. It is the same place where people keep their boarding pass for the aeroplane, their supermarket loyalty card, their rail season ticket and sometimes their bank card.

You do not have to install that app: it is already there. A "wallet pass" is simply a card that is added to it. In this case: the ticket for your event, with the name of your organisation on it.

The visitor has to tap on it once themselves. You do not have to do anything — the buttons are already in the email and on the confirmation page.

Why a pass works better than a pdf

A pdf in a mailbox seems the same thing, but at the door the difference is large.

A wallet pass	A pdf in the email
Appears on the lock screen by itself just before your event	You have to search back for the email
One tap and the screen goes brighter automatically	You turn the brightness up yourself, or you forget
Works without the internet, the pass is in the phone	A pdf that still has to download in a crowded marquee does not work
Sits among the boarding passes and loyalty cards, always in the same place	Sits somewhere in a mailbox with three hundred other emails

That second line is the one you notice most often at the door. Apple and Google turn the brightness of the screen up as soon as the QR code is shown, and a bright screen almost always scans first time.

What you need beforehand

• Nothing per order: the buttons appear by themselves with every valid ticket.
• Once, centrally: an account with Apple and with Google, plus the Apple certificate. See "What has to be set up once" below.
• A visitor with a smartphone. Anyone without one simply prints their ticket; that scans just as well.
• For the poster and the buttons underneath it: the Start plan or higher. On the free plan your wallet passes keep working exactly as they always have.

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What the visitor sees

In the confirmation email and on the ticket page there are two buttons: Add to Apple Wallet and Add to Google Wallet. One tap and the pass is in the phone, with the name of your organisation, the product, the venue and — when there is one — the time slot.

The same buttons are on the confirmation page your visitor is shown after paying:

And they are also in the email itself, so that somebody who clicked the window away can still get at it later:

What is on the pass

On the front	On the back
The product, the venue and the time slot or the valid day	The address of the venue
The QR code	Your order reference and the name of the issuer
	Your text on the back, and the details you did not put on the front, such as the visitor's name

You choose what goes on the front yourself; see "What goes on the front" further down.

On an iPhone you turn a pass over by tapping the three dots at the top right. Handy to know when a visitor asks over the phone where the address is.

Note: an ordinary ticket and a season pass deliberately get a different kind of pass. A ticket belongs to a date and slides neatly to the back in the wallet after that day. A season pass stays at the front for a whole season, because your visitor needs it again every time. See Season passes.

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The ticket as a poster

On a recent iPhone the ticket is no longer a small card but a poster: the photo of your event fills almost the whole screen, the details sit on top of it, and a row of buttons appears underneath.

That happens by itself. It is one ticket that grows with your visitor's phone — a newer iPhone shows more of it, an older one shows the familiar card. You do not have to set anything up separately for it, and nothing can break.

From which plan? The poster, the venue guide, the upcoming dates and the buttons at the top belong to the Start plan and up. On the free plan your wallet passes keep working exactly as they always have: the same QR code, the same fields, just as valid at the door. See Your plan, your invoices and pausing.

On an iPhone with iOS 18 or newer

This is what most visitors see today:

• the photo of your event across almost the whole screen, with the date, the time, the hall and your visitor's name on top of it;
• "doors open at …", when you fill in how many minutes before the start you let people in;
• a row of buttons under the pass: Directions, Parking, Accessibility, Public transport, Order food and What you can bring in. Each button only appears when you have filled something in for it;
• the pass appears on the lock screen by itself when your visitor comes near your venue. For that, your venue needs its two numbers on the map — see below.

On an iPhone with iOS 26 or newer

If your visitor has a season pass or a series — a subscription, a three-day festival, a course of eight evenings — then the upcoming dates are on the pass itself. So they no longer have to look up when they are next expected.

On an iPhone with iOS 27 or newer

Two buttons are added at the top of the pass: Directions and View order. There will never be more than two; that limit comes from Apple and not from us.

On an older iPhone (iOS 17 and earlier)

It shows the familiar ticket: your colour, your logo, the details and the QR code. Nothing is lost and nothing breaks — the phone simply leaves out what it does not know yet.

So you do not have to make a second ticket for older devices, and you never have to ask your visitor which iPhone they have.

On an Android device (Google Wallet)

Google shows the same details, wherever it has a place for them: the image at the top of the pass, the hall, the date and the time, and at the bottom of the pass the links from your venue guide.

Google does not know Apple's row of buttons. That is not a setting that is wrong: that way of showing things simply does not exist there. What you fill in does come along — it is just somewhere else.

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What you fill in, and where

Everything below is optional. You fill it in once and it then appears on every ticket you sell.

Products → a product → the Image and doors section

That section starts collapsed; click it open.

• Poster for this event. A portrait photo works best: that is the shape of a phone screen. A landscape photo gets cropped.
• Doors open, in minutes before the start. Put 30 here for a performance at 8 p.m. and your visitor reads "doors open at 7.30 p.m.".

The section is not there for a season pass or a gift voucher: those two do not apply to a single moment, so a poster and a door time say nothing there.

Venues → a venue

In the The venue section:

• Photo of the place. The front, the hall, the grounds. It steps in when a product itself has no poster.
• Entrance, as it should appear on the pass: "Gate A", "Side entrance".
• Latitude and Longitude: the two numbers that mark your place on the world map. You do not have to look them up yourself — the Find coordinates button takes them from your address. They give you the Directions button, and they make the pass appear on the lock screen by itself.

In the Venue guide section (collapsed as well): Phone, Email, Website, Accessibility, Parking, Public transport, Order food and What you can bring in. Every field you fill in becomes one button under the pass.

Settings → Organisation → Wallet passes tab

This is where you put what applies to all your events together:

• in the Poster tickets section: Image for the poster ticket, used when neither a product nor a venue has a photo, and Doors open as the default for anyone who does not want to fill it in product by product;
• in the Venue guide section: the same links for all your venues together (Website, Accessibility, Parking, Public transport, Order food and What you may bring in; phone and email you fill in per venue). A venue that fills one in itself overrides the one from the organisation.

Which photo wins

Three places can supply an image, and they get their turn in this order:

1. the poster of the product;
2. otherwise the photo of the place at the venue;
3. otherwise the image for the poster ticket under Wallet passes, and if that is empty your cover image there.

If there is no photo anywhere, your visitor gets the familiar ticket instead of the poster. That is not a mistake and not a fault: without an image there is simply no poster to make, and a neat card is better than a poster with a grey rectangle on it.

The same order applies to the door time and to the links of your venue guide: the most specific one wins.

An empty field gives no button

If you do not fill in a parking page, there is no Parking button on the pass either. That is on purpose.

A button that leads nowhere is worse than no button: your visitor taps it while standing in the queue, gets an empty page, and phones you. So fill in three fields properly rather than eight halfway.

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First this

If you want to spend little time on it, do these three. They give you the most:

1. A portrait photo per event. No photo, no poster; with a photo the ticket becomes a poster on your visitor's screen.
2. Your address with the two map numbers. One click on the button that looks them up. That gives you the Directions button, and the pass that appears on the lock screen by itself when your visitor is nearby.
3. The door time. One number, and your visitor knows when they may come. That saves you most of the phone calls on the night itself.

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What you explain to a visitor over the phone

You have this conversation more often than you think. A script that works:

1. "Do you have an iPhone or an Android device?" — that tells you which of the two buttons they need.
2. "Open the confirmation email you got from us. Scroll down until you see the ticket."
3. "Under the ticket there are two buttons. Tap Add to Apple Wallet" (or Google Wallet).
4. "A preview of the card appears. Tap Add at the top right."
5. "Done. From now on you will find it in your Wallet app, and on the day itself it will appear on your lock screen by itself."

If they do not want it, or it does not work: let it go. The ticket in the email works just as well, and a printed sheet scans the quickest of all.

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The QR code is the same

On the pass there is exactly the same code as on the ordinary ticket. So the scan app does not have to know anything about wallets: it simply sees a valid ticket again.

That is also the reason not to tinker with it: anyone who changed the code on the pass would make every pass already in a phone unusable.

In practice this also means that your visitor may perfectly well have both the pass and the paper ticket. It is one ticket with one code; whoever offers it twice gets "double" the second time.

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A ticket that is no longer valid

A cancelled or refunded ticket gets no more passes, and an existing pass stops working. Otherwise there would be a valid-looking QR in the phone of somebody who has already had their money back.

With a season pass there is one deliberate exception. A cancelled or blocked pass gets no more passes. A pass that has simply expired does: it stays in the phone as a reminder that it needs renewing, and at the entrance the scan turns it away with "outside the period". That is a clearer answer than a pass that has suddenly gone.

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What has to be set up once

Wallet passes need an account with Apple and with Google. That is platform work — it is set up centrally and not per organisation. As long as it is not set up, everything works except the two wallet buttons, and whoever clicks on them gets a clear message instead of half a pass.

For Apple a certificate is part of it that expires yearly. A certificate is a kind of digital seal with which Apple can check that a pass really comes from the issuer. If it runs out, existing passes keep working but no new ones are created.

Note: so that is exactly the kind of failure you only notice when a visitor rings. If the button no longer works for you while it still worked last month, report it to us straight away instead of waiting — it is almost always this.

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Designing your pass

A visitor's pass is often the only thing of yours that stays on their phone, for months, between their bank card and their train ticket. So you get to design it yourself, under Settings → Organisation → Wallet passes tab.

Everything on that tab may stay empty. Fill in nothing and your pass follows your own brand colour and shop logo from the Branding tab — and failing that, the platform's colours. You need do nothing to have a tidy pass.

Colours

Three colours, each doing something different:

Colour	Where it shows
Background	the whole face of the pass
Text	the values: the date, the name, the product
Labels	the small words above each value

In the preview at the bottom of the tab a warning appears when a combination has too little contrast, with the number alongside. That number runs from 1 (the same colour twice) to 21 (black on white); below 4.5 small text becomes hard work. Bear in mind that a pass is read in a queue, on a phone with the brightness down and the sun on it.

Watch the labels in particular: they are set small, so they need more contrast than the text itself — precisely the other way round from what most people assume.

We will not stop you. A pass in your own colours that we find ugly is your call; a pass nobody can read, we would rather have warned you about.

Logo and cover image

You upload one logo; we make it into the six files Apple and Google each ask for separately. Apple puts it at the top of the pass and uses it as the icon on the lock screen, Google cuts a round logo out of it.

What to watch for:

• a png with a transparent background. Your logo sits straight on your background colour. A png with a white rectangle around it gives you a white postage stamp on a coloured pass — the classic. The preview at the bottom of the tab warns you about it;
• at least 480 pixels wide, or it turns blurry on a sharp screen;
• 2 MB at most. Larger files are refused.

The cover image is optional: a wide photo above the details, about 3 to 1 and at least 1125 pixels wide. Leave it blank and you get a pass in one colour — often calmer. A photo of your building or your hall usually works better than a photo with text on it: the pass is cropped and the text ends up half cut off.

An svg will not do. Apple accepts only png files, and we make those for you from your upload. If all you have is an svg logo, export it once as a png.

Texts

Name on the pass is the name as it appears at the top. Apple shows it small and cuts it off; if your official name is long ("Royal Local History Society asbl"), put the short one here. Your name on the invoice does not change.

Text on the back is practical detail your visitor then carries with them: how to get in, where to park, that a ticket is not refunded. You fill it in per language. If you only filled in Dutch, a French-speaking visitor gets that Dutch text — better than an empty back.

What goes on the front

Per type of pass — ticket, timed ticket, season pass, gift voucher — you choose which details your visitor sees without turning the pass over: date and time, holder name, ticket type, venue.

Two things to know:

1. the order counts. The first field is shown large, the two after it on a row below, the rest small. More than three on the front will not fit across one screen;
2. what you leave out does not disappear. It moves to the back of the pass. An awkward choice therefore never loses an address.

By default the product comes first. On a timed ticket the date and time follow straight after it, before the venue — that is what someone in a queue looks for.

See it first, save it after

At the bottom of the tab, under This is how it will look, sits a live preview: the Apple version and the Google version, moving along as you fill things in. With Show as you choose which kind of pass you look at. The two platforms really do something different with the same colour, so look at both.

The preview stays an approximation — Apple and Google draw the real pass with their own fonts. To have it in your hand, click Send a test pass to my e-mail address. You get an email at the address you are signed in with, with the same two buttons as your visitor. Open it on your phone: the pass has your design and made-up details. The code grants no access: at the door it is refused.

The test pass carries the design as it has been saved. So save first, then send.

Season passes and gift vouchers

A season pass and a gift voucher can go into the wallet just as well, with the same design. A gift voucher always shows its balance at the top, whatever else you choose: it is the only thing anyone opens a voucher for.

A blocked voucher gets no pass any more. An empty or expired one does — it may stay in the phone, and at the counter "this voucher is used up" is a clearer answer than a pass that has suddenly gone.

Money on the ticket

If you work with a bar balance at the bar, that balance sits on the pass itself. Your visitor opens their ticket and sees how much is still on it — no app and no logging in.

It comes along by itself: every time something is topped up, paid or refunded, the pass in the phone brings itself up to date. There is nothing for you to do.

If there is nothing on it, or your organisation does not work with balances, the line is not there either. A card showing "€ 0.00" while there is nothing anywhere to buy with it is more confusing than a card without that line.

See Bar balance on a pass for how you top up, take payment and refund.

Common mistakes

• Offering your visitor the wallet button as the only route. Not everybody has a smartphone, and not everybody wants to work with one. The ticket in the email and on paper stays just as valid.
• Thinking that a pass is something other than a ticket. It is the same code. Offering it twice gives the same result twice.
• Forwarding a pass to somebody else. That is technically possible, but it stays one code: whoever stands at the door with it second does not get in.
• Waiting to report it when the button stops working. That is usually the yearly expiry of the Apple certificate, and we sort that out.
• Deleting the pass after a change to the order. That is not necessary; a ticket that has become invalid is turned away at the door anyway.

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What if …

What if the wallet button does nothing?

Two possibilities. Either the ticket is no longer valid — cancelled or refunded — and then the button should do nothing. Or the central setting is not in order, because the Apple certificate has expired for instance. In that case your visitor gets a message and not a broken page. Let us know; in the meantime the ticket in the email simply works.

What if the visitor has deleted their pass by accident?

Have them open the confirmation email again and tap the button once more. They get the same pass back, not a second one. If they can no longer find the email, resend the confirmation from the order.

What if there is no internet at the door?

The pass is in the phone and does not need a connection to be shown. Your scan app carries on working offline too. See Scan app and scanning staff.

What if somebody has an Android device without Google Wallet?

That happens on cheaper devices and on devices without Google services. In that case use the ordinary ticket in the email, or print it. Nothing is lost: the code is the same.

What if the visitor's screen is too dark?

A wallet pass turns the brightness up itself as soon as the QR is shown. If it does not do that, a pdf or a screenshot is probably open instead of the pass. Ask them to open the Wallet app.

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Frequently asked questions

Does my visitor have to install an app? No. Wallet is already on every iPhone and Google Wallet on just about every Android device. All that is added is a card.

Does this cost my visitor or me anything extra? No. It is part of the ticket.

Can I still adjust the pass afterwards? The design yes, on the Wallet passes tab; new passes take it over. The content follows the ticket. If something changes about the order, contact us rather than trying it yourself: the code on the pass must never change, because that would break every pass already in a phone.

Does this work on a smartwatch too? Passes in Apple Wallet generally appear on a paired Apple Watch as well. We cannot guarantee that per device — so do not count on it at the door and keep the phone as the normal route.

Does the pass stay after the event? Yes, until your visitor deletes it themselves. A ticket pass slides to the back of the list after the date; a season pass stays at the front until its period is over.