The announcement was made during the 2023 Alipay Partner Conference when Alipay revealed that the revised version is tailored to provide specialised services for foreign visitors to China in anticipation of the Hangzhou Asian Games.
The international version of the Alipay app offers language alternatives such as English and a user-friendly translation tool. Its primary goal is to cater to the mobile payment requirements of international travellers in China, thereby improving their local travel encounters. Additionally, the app integrates commonly used travel amenities, encompassing functions such as hotel reservations, flight bookings, ride-hailing, public transportation access, and currency exchange rate checks. Notably, the enhanced version also incorporates services related to the Asian Games through the Smart Hangzhou mini program.
Starting in 2022, Alipay has engaged in collaborations with global card networks to enhance its payment facilities for overseas tourists. Upon downloading the Alipay app, international visitors can register and associate their international credit or debit cards from Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Discover, and Diners Club International. This enables them to effect payments at a vast network of Alipay partner merchants spanning China.
These merchants comprise dining establishments, cafes, tourist destinations, shopping centres, street vendors, and public transportation systems.
In the company press release, Alipay representatives expressed their commitment to refining their products and services to better accommodate international travellers in China. This entails providing them with convenient mobile payment options to enhance their travel undertakings. They also encouraged more digital merchants and service providers on the Alipay platform to augment their offerings to cater to the needs of international visitors.
In the same context of making international travellers feel more at home in China, Alipay entered a partnership with Mastercard in June 2023. The two entities collaborated to launch a new payment option that improves the convenience of international travellers. The two entities originally established a partnership in 2019 to provide improved digital payment solutions to both consumers and merchants.
This development built on that foundation and aimed to allow international travellers to China to ‘pay like locals’ regardless of where in the world their Mastercard card was issued. In essence, Mastercard cardholders could link their existing credit or debit cards to the Alipay digital wallet and pay cashless via their mobile devices at millions of Alipay acceptance locations across the country.
Representatives from Ant Group, which is the owner and operator of Alipay, talked about this recent partnership with Mastercard and emphasised its potential to support an improved experience for international travellers when visiting China while opening up more business opportunities for merchants on the Alipay open platform.
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