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Case StudiesCase Studies

Case study: egPay delivers six-week deployment at Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Oasis

James Kilpin
20 May
2021
min read

Held at the spectacular Diriyah Oasis entertainment complex, Diriyah Season was a six-week celebration of music, sport and culture – a series of experiences at the UNESCO World Heritage which included marquee events like the Formula E Grand Prix, Diriyah Tennis Cup, Diriyah Equestrian Festival, the ‘Clash on The Dunes’ (the heavyweight world title fight between Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz Jr) and numerous live music events.

Formula E at Diriyah Season (Image: Diriyah Season)

Across the six weeks in late 2019, Diriyah Oasis was also transformed into a family entertainment district and theme park with over 60 rides, games, stalls and attractions including an outdoor ice rink, aqua karts farmers’ markets, forests, virtual-reality sports and much more. 

The ambitious project which presented one of our biggest opportunities yet to deliver our egPay cashless solution on a grand scale.

Client Requirements:


Evolution Events – the event creators and organisers – wanted an easy-to-use cashless system which was adaptable, scalable, and improved the onsite event experience of the 300,000+ fans who would be passing through the gates.

The Diriyah Season events needed tools to ensure fans could seamlessly spend on rides and attractions, keep queues to a minimum, digitally track ingress and egress and improve the flow of attendees across the site.

Services Supplied:

egPay was deployed across the full Diriyah Oasis entertainment complex. All customers were issued an RFID enabled wristband upon entry which could be topped up at self-service top-up stations and used to pay for all attractions across the site. 

egAccess was used in order to digitally track attendees upon entry and exit of the complex, across multiple access points. 

Diriyah Oasis (Image: Diriyah Season)

Success Stories:

Our innovative POS cashless system ensured that more than 100 locations and 60 attractions spread across the four zones of the 130,000 square meters of the Diriyah Oasis – Nature, Imagination, Reflection, and Excitement – could be easily used by customers without the need for cash, tokens or card payments.

With egPay, customers had a variety of easy ways to check and top-up their balance without the need for external support, including using their mobile phone. This resulted in much less time spent waiting in queues, and more time enjoying the array of entertainment on offer.

The six week deployment represented our biggest ever egPay roll out, with over 300,000 RFID enabled wristbands, 330 hardware devices and four Event Genius staff on the ground in Saudi Arabia for the duration of the event completing 2000+ hours of service and support collectively, overseeing all technical operations and staff training.

Festicket CSO (Chief Supply Chain Officer) and Event Genius founder, Reshad Hossenally commented: “This was our biggest cashless project to date in terms of the sheer scale of the site, the number of fans passing through the gates and the number of attractions available to fans. It was exciting to test ourselves like this and help deliver such a successful cashless installation.

The events market is really starting to boom in the Middle East so it’s great to have such a big series of events under our belt in the region, along with a lot of insight and learnings we can bring to future events there. ”

If you're interested to know more about how Event Genius can help with your live event, please get in touch today, we'd love to hear from you! You can also read more about our services can help transform your attractions here.

Live Music Concert taking place as part of the Diriyah Season (Image: Diriyah Season)


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