Greenfield Festivals
Open-air sites, temporary power, thousands of transactions a day.
From muddy fields to manicured grounds, Dines deploys in under 24 hours with offline-first payments that keep every vendor trading regardless of connectivity.
Dines for Festivals & Events
You get one shot a year. Make every transaction count.
Unreliable connectivity. Traders who've never used the system. 50,000 people expecting fast service. One chance to get it right. Dines was built for exactly this.
Dines is a hospitality POS platform built for festivals, outdoor events, and large-scale live entertainment where connectivity is unreliable and every second counts. The system's offline-first architecture fails over from Wi-Fi to eSIM to full offline mode in 9 seconds, achieving a 97.4% offline capture rate. Trusted by Hyde Park Winter Wonderland, Royal Highland Show, Taste of London, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Dines deploys in 24 to 48 hours with on-site support, handles rapid trader onboarding (traders live in minutes, not hours), and settles every vendor within 2 to 7 days with 100% settlement accuracy. The platform has achieved 97.3% offline sales capture. Includes Tilly AI for instant menu setup and real-time performance reporting across all traders.
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Question 1 of 8Reliability & Connectivity
What happens to your payments when connectivity drops on site?
Trusted at the UK & Ireland's biggest events
Tilly AI for Events
AI built for high-pressure, live environments.
Configure traders on the fly. Monitor live sales across every bar and stall. Tilly handles the complexity so you can focus on the event.
Discover Tilly AI➜Live conversation
Ask a question in natural language with your voice or type it in, and Tilly will respond.
The event reality
Events aren’t restaurants. The rules are different.
Connectivity is unreliable.
Fields, marquees, temporary structures. Wi-Fi drops. 4G overloads. You need a system that keeps taking payments regardless (97.4% offline capture rate).
Peak is compressed and extreme.
Thousands of transactions in a few hours. Queue speed is revenue. Every second of downtime at peak costs real money.
Traders are new every time.
Your vendors may never have used the system before. They need to be live in minutes, not hours. No training manuals. No patience.
Setup happens in days.
Not weeks. Hardware arrives, traders onboard, menus configured, terminals tested. All before gates open. There's no buffer.
Settlement must be fast.
Traders want their money. Quickly. Accurately (100% settlement accuracy). If settlement is slow or wrong, they won't come back next year.
You're judged on one event.
One bad year and you lose traders, sponsors, and reputation. The technology has to be invisible. It just has to work.
Reliability
The Wi-Fi drops. You keep taking payments.
Dines switches to offline mode in 9 seconds. Every transaction captured. Every sale recorded. When connectivity returns, everything syncs automatically. No lost revenue. No panic.
97.4%Offline capture success rate
9sOffline failover time
5%Of festival payments taken offline
How it works
How deployment works.
We deploy fast because events don’t wait. Here’s how we get you from “let’s do this” to “gates open” without the chaos.
1
Scope & Plan
We map your event: vendor count, layout, connectivity, peak windows. Hardware, menus, and payment terminals planned and allocated before anything ships.
2
Hardware & Setup
Terminals, printers, and kiosks delivered and configured to your site plan. On-site or remote setup, tested end to end before traders arrive.
3
Go Live
Traders onboard in minutes. Our team is on-site or on standby throughout. Real-time monitoring with under 60s response if anything needs attention.
4
Settle & Review
Every vendor settled within days. Full post-event analytics covering revenue, peak trading patterns, and throughput data. Ready to plan next year.
Trusted at the UK & Ireland’s biggest events
Proven at scale.
Agricultural Shows
Multi-day events, sprawling sites, hundreds of vendors to settle.
From county fairs to national agricultural shows, Dines handles multi-zone deployments with real-time reporting across every food and drink trader on site.
Christmas Markets & Winter Events
Ice rinks, ski lodges, outdoor markets. Freezing conditions, flawless payments.
Cold weather, outdoor environments, high footfall. Technology that works regardless of conditions.
Edinburgh Fringe
Taste of London
Royal Highland Show
Go deeper
See what Dines can do for your event.
The Event Tech Playbook
How to run payments, settlement, and reporting across a multi-bar, multi-vendor event site. Built from festivals and large-scale events.
Report coming soonSee Dines at a Live Event
Watch how Dines handles peak trading, offline payments, and real-time reporting at live events across the UK & Ireland.
Demo coming soonMeet Tilly AI
Ask Tilly anything about running an event. Configure traders, pull live reports, troubleshoot on the fly. AI built for high-pressure environments.
Meet TillyProof from your world
See what operators with similar challenges think about Dines.
Mark Currie
Managing Director, Royal Highland Centre & Royal Highland Show
Since coming on board with Dines, we're already seeing the returns. We previously had a low-risk model based on pitch fees from caterers and bars. We've since moved to a percentage margin across all our sites, and it's been a really successful transition.
A day in the life
Same event. Two very different days.
A festival or event operator's working day, gates-open to last-call. On the left, every minute personally spent on dawn checks, trader hand-holding and post-event spreadsheets. On the right, all of that handled for you.
Without DinesWith Dines
Without Dines
11+hrs
of event day spent personally firefighting kit, queues, opinions and missing traders.
VS
With Dines
<45min
of operator admin with Dines. The rest of the day is on your event, not in a comms hub.
Dawn site check
Without Dines
Forty terminals. Forty different versions of 'is it working?'
Walk the site at dawn. Test each terminal manually. Several are offline and two have the wrong menus loaded. Gates open in two hours and you're still patching kit.
2 hrsat dawn firefighting before gates open
With Dines
All forty terminals green on one screen.
Dines Event Ops run the health check pre-opening. Every terminal, every menu, every price confirmed live before sunrise. Tilly flagged the one pricing error automatically yesterday. You walk the site with coffee, not a clipboard.
10 minsite-wide check from one screen
07:00
Trader onboarding
Without Dines
Ninety minutes to get one trader live.
Pop-up vendor arrives late. Their hardware doesn't talk to your system. Ninety minutes on the phone to two support lines. They sell cash-only for the first session. You'll be reconciling that by hand later.
1 hr 30to onboard one trader, badly
With Dines
Pre-provisioned handheld. Live in ten.
Hand them a pre-provisioned Dines handheld from the Event Ops Kit. Menu, cards, switch from the trader portal they filled out yesterday. Their split is already configured. The Dines festival POS system has them raising their first cashless order before the queue forms.
10 minfrom welcome to first cashless order
13:00
Queue surge
Without Dines
Forty-five minutes to figure out where the queue is.
Three thousand people through the gates in an hour. Some bars are slammed, others are quiet. Radio chatter says 'send more staff', but to where? You walk it and guess. By the time you've worked it out, the surge has moved.
45 minof manual queue chasing on radio
With Dines
Live heat-map, two taps, and the surge clears.
Tilly flags the two hottest points and recommends staff moves. Bar 3 is hitting 90% capacity, so you pull two staff from the quieter east stage. The queue is gone in eight minutes.
2 minto spot and redeploy from your phone
14:00
Signal drop / payments
Without Dines
An hour of failed payments. £18k of walked sales.
Field terminals become patchy as the headliner crowd enters. Wi-Fi on event sites is unreliable, and most POS setups can't handle the drop. Card payments fail. 'Cash only' signs go up. Half the queue walks. You'll reconcile missed sales for three weeks.
1 hrof failed payments. £18k walked
With Dines
Offline-first with 9-second failover. 97.4% capture.
Dines handhelds dive into offline mode automatically when signal fluctuates. Payments sync locally and upload the moment coverage returns. Vendors never stop trading. Customers never know. You see it in the report afterwards.
9 secauto-failover. 97.4% capture rate
17:00
Support call
Without Dines
Forty minutes on hold while the site keeps moving.
A terminal at one of the bars goes down during the afternoon rush. You call your provider and reach a queue. Forty minutes on hold. The agent suggests a restart you've already tried. You send a runner to swap the device from the spare kit.
40 minon hold, no actual resolution
With Dines
A real hospitality expert in sixty seconds. Fixed in five.
You call Dines support, 24/7, 365 days a year. A real engineer picks up in under a minute, diagnoses the terminal remotely, and pushes the fix. Average solution time: around five minutes. You stayed in the ops tent the entire time.
5 minhuman on ticket. ~5 min to fix
19:00
Voucher / redeemables
Without Dines
Two hours unpicking paper vouchers and angry sponsors.
Sponsor meal vouchers, VIP drink credits and pre-paid packages run on physical paper. Tokens get lost, traders dispute redemptions, and the sponsor wants a report you can't produce. You spend the evening chasing clipboards.
2 hrsof voucher disputes mid-event
With Dines
All redeemables digital. One live report.
Meal tokens, drink credits and pre-paid packages are issued and redeemed digitally through Dines. The sponsor sees live redemption rates on a shared dashboard. Traders are paid for every token they redeemed, to the penny.
10 minto open check and load with the sponsor
Post-event
Settlement
Without Dines
Four days of spreadsheets and at least two trader disputes.
Forty traders, six revenue streams, three payment processors. Manual splits in a spreadsheet someone broke. Final payouts go out next Friday. Two traders will dispute their numbers. You won't sleep much.
30+ hrsacross the week after the event
With Dines
Itemised statements. Payouts in 2-7 days.
The Dines event POS system calculates every split, commission, fee, couvert and rebate automatically on the event run. Each trader gets an itemised payment showing sales, redemptions and deductions. Payouts hit accounts within 2-7 days, every time.
15 minto sign off. 2-7 day clean payouts
Operator time on event day
11+ hrs➜< 45 min
Personal admin hours saved
Sales captured in outage
0%➜97.4%
9 sec offline failover
Event-day support
On hold➜< 60s
Real engineer, ~5 min to fix
Trader settlement
30+ hrs➜2-7 days
Itemised and automatic
The platform
Explore the full events toolkit.
Other Venues
Run a different type of venue?
See how we serve other venues like yours.
Frequently asked questions.
Free Event Readiness Assessment
Share your site plan and vendor model. We'll show you exactly how Dines would deploy for your next event, including timeline, hardware, and settlement plan.
Book your free assessmentFestival season starts soon. Secure your deployment slot.