Loyalty for a business that moves: food trucks and pop-ups

The pass is the only fixed address you have

A food truck has no street sign, no window to walk past, and no address a customer can drive to twice. The one thing that stays in the same place is the loyalty pass sitting in your customer's Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Treat that pass as your permanent address and the rest of the program gets simple.

Enrollment happens while the order is being made. The customer scans the QR code on your service window, types a first name and a mobile number on one screen, and taps once to add the card. No app, no account, no password. On a busy night that is about ten seconds of their attention.

Be clear about what this is not. Waya has no POS integration, no hardware, and no SMS sending. Your staff add stamps by scanning the customer's card on an ordinary phone, either from the web dashboard or the Waya merchant iOS app. For a truck with one phone, a card reader, and a cash box, that is the right amount of technology.

The same logic covers pop-ups: a weekend market stall, a coffee cart booked into an office lobby for three days, a dessert brand renting a mall kiosk through Ramadan, the fasting month when late-night trading peaks in Saudi Arabia. If your address is temporary, the pass has to be the constant.

Why your lock screen beats your Instagram story

A coffee shop on a corner gets found by accident. You do not. Every night you have to tell people where you are, and the channel you pick decides how many of them find out in time to come.

An Instagram story reaches the people who open Instagram in the next few hours and happen to be served it. A wallet pass update goes to the lock screen of every phone that holds your card, without the customer opening anything at all. That difference is why a business that moves gets more out of a wallet pass than a fixed shop does. No phone numbers get handed to a third-party messaging app either.

It is a notification, not a guarantee. Some people mute it, some never look, and a message is only worth sending if the information is still true when it is read. If the lot falls through at 6pm, do not leave a 4pm promise sitting on 300 lock screens. Send the correction, or wait until the spot is confirmed before you announce anything.

Do the message math before you promise a nightly announcement

This is where plans for moving businesses break, so run the numbers first. The free plan includes 100 wallet messages a month. If 100 people hold your card, one location announcement to all of them spends the entire monthly allowance in a single send.

The Growth plan is 85 SAR a month, or 867 SAR a year, and includes 5,000 messages. With 300 card holders that is 16 sends a month, roughly four a week, which covers a weekend location note plus one reward reminder. That works out to under 3 SAR a day. Note what you are actually buying on paid plans: messages. Customers are unlimited there.

Now the enrollment side, with the assumptions written out. Say you serve 90 orders on a busy night, 15 of those customers scan the code, and you work four such nights a month; the Saudi working week runs Sunday to Thursday, so Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings are usually the heavy ones. That is 60 new cards a month, which puts you through the free plan's 100-customer ceiling during the second month. Nothing breaks when you hit it: enrolled customers keep their cards and keep collecting, but new sign-ups stop until you move up.

Geofences fit your regular pitches, not one-off nights

Waya can also put a passive reminder on a card holder's lock screen when they are near one of your locations. It is configured per branch, on the Branches screen. One detail catches people out: the Address and Maps fields on the card itself are not the geofence, so filling those in does nothing for proximity.

That feature assumes a location that sits still, which makes it a poor match for a different lot every night. You would be editing the branch record every afternoon, and the free plan gives you one branch while Growth gives you three. Setting it wrong is worse than not using it, because the reminder then fires in the wrong neighborhood.

So split your schedule in two. Register the pitches you return to every week as branches: the office-park lunch spot, the lot you always take on Friday. Then handle one-night events and private bookings with an announcement message instead, and leave the geofence alone.

When the truck is the sign, the QR code does the work

Put the QR code where people stand still, which is the end of the line rather than the pay window. At the window they are counting cash and taking a hot bag. Keep a second copy on the side panel and a laminated spare inside the truck, because the outdoor one will get wet, greasy, or peeled off.

Test the code at night. Glossy lamination throws string lights and truck LEDs straight back into the camera, and a sign that scans fine at noon can be unreadable at 9pm. One line of instruction is enough: scan, add the card, collect a stamp. Waya cards work in Arabic or English, so pick the language your line actually speaks.

The design is yours: colors, logo, stamp count, and the reward wording. Make it match the truck's wrap, because weeks later that pass, sitting in a list with a dozen others, is the only picture of your business the customer has. The pass updates itself, so the stamp count and reward text they open are always current.

What this costs next to the other Saudi options

Prices below are as of August 2026, taken from what each vendor publishes; check them before you decide, because they move. Niqati is the best-known loyalty name in the Saudi market and prices by quote. Btaqa publishes tiers at 108, 250, and 380 SAR a month. OneCup is around 150 SAR a month, and Watily is 149 SAR a month with loyalty bundled into a wider plan.

Most of them ship wallet passes, so that is not the difference. The difference is where you start: each of those begins with a paid subscription, while Waya's free plan is 0 SAR forever for up to 100 customers, 100 messages a month, one stamp card, and one branch, with no credit card. There is no commission on sales, no per-card fee, and no setup fee on any plan. For a truck still testing whether its customers will scan a code at all, starting at zero is worth more than a longer feature list.

The other option is a generic international punch-card app, where the customer downloads a shared consumer app and looks for you inside it. At a truck window, in a line, in the wind, that download is where you lose them. A wallet pass has nothing to install.

Work one weekend, then read the numbers

Set the card up in an afternoon, print one sign, and work a single weekend before you change anything. Then read the dashboard: visits, redemptions, new versus returning customers, and which regulars have gone quiet, with win-back messaging from the same screen.

One honest gap: the dashboard does not tell you which lot a scan happened in. So keep your own one-line note of where you parked each night, and read it next to the enrollment dates. After four or five nights you will see which pitch produces customers who come back, which is a more useful question than which pitch produced the most scans.

For reference on scale, the figures our Arabic homepage publishes are 100+ shops across Saudi Arabia, more than 5,000 cards living in wallets, and a 4.9 out of 5 average rated by 90 merchants. Your own first month will look nothing like an average, and that is fine. Start on the free plan, get 30 cards into wallets, and decide from there.