Princess Cruises announced that Chinese guests onboard Ruby Princess have the option to utilize both Alipay and WeChat Pay payment options while shopping in the boutiques. This makes Princess Cruises the first and the only cruise line to offer both Alipay and WeChat Pay payment options onboard a passenger cruise ship in North America.  

 

Alipay and WeChat Pay are China's top-two popular forms of digital payment. Alipay's in-store payment service covers over 40 countries and regions across the world. Currently, over 900 million people use the system for digital transactions globally. WeChat Pay now has 800 million monthly active users worldwide and total volume a year in 2017 was about USD 6.5 trillion.  

 

Princess Cruises will provide amenities to its Chinese guests making payments during international travel more seamless by offering home-away-from-home comforts on select ships including Chinese language menus, Chinese culinary dishes, Chinese onboard hosts, Chinese-language shore excursions. 

 

Guests first used the convenient digital payment platforms of Alipay and WeChat Pay in The Shops of Princess onboard Majestic Princess, the first luxury cruise ship tailor-made for the Chinese market in 2017 during the cruise ship's summer deployment in Shanghai.