credit card swipes

O’Hare-Midway strives to be innovative and aggressive with its’ choice of current technology. However, we always prefer that any upgrades to our systems be well tested and proven in the marketplace.

Most of our customers are probably not even aware that several months ago we made the important decision to use “Nextel” phones for communication between our dispatchers and chauffeurs. Even though we will continue to use our two-way radios, these new phones will give us much more reliable and clearer dispatch capabilities. And an important additional benefit with these phones is that we now have the ability to “swipe” credit card transactions in the limousine.

The old procedure required our chauffeurs to manually write up a charge, which would then be turned in to the main office sometimes as much as a week after the actual trip. This process often caused a lot of confusion for our customers because the date on the credit card statement was different than the date of the trip. Now the trip will be posted to a customer’s account on the same day, a welcome change for both O’Hare-Midway and our valued clientele. It will take several weeks to get all our chauffeurs trained and comfortable with this change, but the end result will be well worth it! As always, we appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Here’s how the “swipe” procedure will work:

The chauffeur will swipe your credit card through our new credit card printer. This will produce a receipt for you to sign and add the gratuity. The chauffeur will then enter your gratuity and send the transaction off to the credit card processor. It is at this point that the credit card will be authorized and an approval obtained. Because this procedure is new to our chauffeurs, we ask that you provide the credit card to the chauffeur at the beginning of the trip.