I live in Punta Cana Village. Every time I order something through Uber Eats I have to give the driver permission to get in, and it takes me about 10 minutes.
Here’s how it goes. Uber assigns the driver and I message them in the Uber chat to ask for their ID number on WhatsApp, because I need it to create the pass. But Uber doesn’t let phone numbers, IDs or photos through. I type my number, the message gets deleted, I try again. Last time the driver spelled his out in words, “eight… nine…”, to get around the block. I copied it down and it was wrong. I told him, he repeated it, and I finally managed to message him on WhatsApp.
And that’s not the end of it. I ask for the ID, open the Grupo Punta Cana app, fill in about 12 fields (sometimes the send button does nothing and you have to try again) and send him the PDF on WhatsApp. When he arrives, the guard looks at the image, reads the date and that’s it. They almost never scan the code.
I see two problems.
The first is my number. In the last 30 days I ordered 15 times on Uber Eats, 2 on Uber and 9 from Bravo. That’s 26 people I don’t know with my WhatsApp. And about 750 families live in the village, from what I found. If a lot of them do the same, that’s a huge amount of phone numbers floating around every month.
The second is the pass. I’m giving a stranger a full-day pass to the entire community, with a static image that can be forwarded. I don’t know who he is or what else he could do with that permission inside.
What I’m proposing
A “quick pass”. It would be a third option, next to the family pass and the supplier pass, which stay as they are. Only for deliveries.
You tap a button when the delivery is about to arrive. The pass lasts 15 minutes, works for a single entry and shows up on its own on the guard’s screen at the gatehouse. The driver says the unit and the guard sees it right there. I don’t send anything to anyone, not an ID and not my number. If I have the driver’s phone number the link can go out by SMS, but it isn’t needed. The guard can keep taking the physical ID at the door.
Since the guard usually just looks, the pass looks alive: a real clock, a countdown and a code that keeps changing. A screenshot from yesterday can’t do that. The idea comes from Swish, the Swedish payments app, which animates the screen on confirmation so you can see it happened right now.
This is a proposal, not a product. The system is theirs and I can’t touch it. So I built a page with a demo you can try: you activate the pass, swipe your finger over it and watch it show up at the gate. It’s at winnercrespo.com/pase-rapido and it says clearly that it has no official relation to Grupo Punta Cana.
It’s not a complaint. It’s a suggestion from a resident who lives this every week. I might make an Instagram video to see if it reaches someone who could make it real. And if they want, I’m happy to help.
If you live in the village and this happens to you too, share it.
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