Carres Ferry Booking System vC2 POS — bank compatibility

Carres Ferry Booking System vC2 is a point-of-sale system for hospitality, built by Carus Pbs. A ferry-ticketing specialist from the Åland Islands that has been bought, bought back and merged — and Spirit of Tasmania sits on its customer wall.

Certified on Linkly, running on premise. Linkly reaches more acquirers than any other middleware in the market, which is why most POS start there.

The Linkly integration runs on premise.

Carus Ab Ltd runs out of Mariehamn in the Åland Islands, Finland, with a second arm, Carus Cruise Inc, in Seattle. Anders Rundberg founded it in late 1998 to build a standard booking and check-in system for the cruise and ferry trade, went live with the first customer in December 1999, and is still CEO. The ownership story is the interesting part: Anite Group plc, listed in London, acquired Carus in November 2001, and management bought it back out of Anite in February 2008. It then went acquiring itself, picking up Quintek Systems in England and MNC Marine in Finland in 2015, before merging with the Winpos Group in February 2018.

Scale is real for a niche this narrow — 35 shipping, ferry and cruise operators across 18 countries and four continents, handling over 33 million passengers, 5 million vehicles and more than a million cargo units a year. Named customers include P&O Ferries, Fjord Line, Wasaline and the Alaska Marine Highway, with its 3,500-mile route network and 38 terminals. The customer wall also carries Condor Ferries, Wightlink, the Isle of Man Steam Packet, TT-Line and Spirit of Tasmania.

Worth being precise about what the till actually is. Carus Reservation, or CarRes, is the booking and departure control engine covering call centre and web sales, groups, freight and port operations. The retail and electronic point of sale piece is a separate product, Carus Onboard. So a ferry operator running Carus is buying a reservations platform first, and the onboard shop and bar terminals second.