Croke Park | Dublin, Ireland

CROKE PARK

Dublin, Ireland

Images: Kappture, MONDO | STADIA

C

roke Park, Dublin, is the third largest stadium in Europe, with a total capacity of 82,300. The venue, which has approved certification from both UEFA and FIFA, hosts a range of events, from sport through to large concerts. More notably, perhaps, Croke Park is the proud home of Ireland’s largest sporting and cultural organisation, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and has hosted its sporting events for over 100 years.

The key to Croke Park’s longevity is its long history of innovation and development, ensuring that the ground remains best in class and delivers an unrivalled experience for fans and visitors. In 1991, designs were put forward to increase the capacity of Croke Park and, after 14 years, the renovations were completed with the new capacity. To further enrich the guest experience at the stadium, the team at Croke Park, working with Aramark and Kappture, put in place another project, with the focus being to increase the speed of concession payments, utilising the Kappture POS (Point of Sale) system across 396 terminals across the site, whilst building in a streamlined and smart cash and stock management system. Back in 2018, this work was carried out by a team of just three engineers over five days. Kappture has delivered lightning-fast transactions, but also, for the first time in the stadium’s history, enabled real time reporting and customisable dashboards for quick KPI analysis. The benefits of Kappture’s technology are clear, particularly the increased speed of transactions, which, in turn, meant an increased volume of sales and revenue. In early 2022, Kappture completed a full hardware upgrade of the entire Croke Park site, installing the K1 devices across the stadium. The K1 devices are energy efficient and offer a customer-facing second screen with integrated RFID & magstripe reader. On the back of the hardware upgrade, Kappture also created a new integration to the clover device that is used by Allied Irish Bank Merchant Services. Kappture’s consistent innovation ensures that Croke Park and Aramark have the best-in-class EPOS system. Since Kappture was installed at Croke Park, the stadium has hosted over 100 GAA matches and played host to outstanding live music events for some of the biggest names in the world - Ed Sheeran, Westlife, Taylor Swift, Spice Girls and The Rolling Stones, to name but a few The security, reliability and robustness of the Kappture software has played its part in making sure these huge shows are executed smoothly and without any downtime. Having seen the system delivered and go live, Croke Park’s Financial Controller, Michael Teahan received positive from the on-site team. He added: “We worked closely together through the Covid period to plan the upgrade. The on-site teams then deployed in January 2022, in readiness for the restart of events at the stadium. The customer feedback over the past six months has been positive and the operations team are feeling the benefit of the new EPOS and payment platform.”