As the churches were to be opened to its faithful in Mumbai in the last week of November post Covid19, the priests in the city had a particular problem to be solved. They had to start weekly masses and people were eager to join the Holy Mass. However with social distancing norms in place it was not possible to seat all the parishioners inside the church and they didn’t want to send back parishioners from the gates citing paucity of space.

Then came QuickPass to their rescue.

“As the lockdown on religious places was lifted and our parish church reopened for the public celebration of the Eucharist, it was important to regulate the number of those who could attend each service. This was done very efficiently by QuickPass. It is a user friendly and dependable way to ensure that parishioners can enlist to attend services,” said Fr. Leon Mascharenhas, Parish Priest of Holy Family Church who conceived the idea of QuickPass in July 2020.

''With the regulations of the state, we had to find a solution to make people sit inside the church. Whereas we used to seat 350-400 people earlier now with the distancing norm we could seat only 100. QuickPass had a solution for us,'' says the parish priest of one of the church that implemented QuickPass.

The process to implement QuickPass is very simple and can be used by any organisation which attracts visitors. The church signs up and gets a unique link which they circulate among community members to ''Reserve'' their seats in the church. The parishioners can select the mass of their choice and also get to know the number of seats available. Once they enter their valid data, the QuickPass is generated and displayed on their phones. They take a screen shot of the pass and display it at the gate for entry.

The priest also gets the dashboard access and gets to see how many people have reserved their seats for different masses. ''It’s pretty helpful to us. We didn’t have to do any data entry. People booked masses and everything went smoothly. No waiting at the gates or sending back parishioners,'' said Fr. Lincoln Rebello, parish priest of Divyakripa Church in Khargar which saw 290 passes booked for the first Sunday mass on 27th November 2020.

Though many parishes have found indigenous ways to handle the situation, the next challenge to them will be handling the rush for the Christmas Mass. With its automated solution, churches who have signed up with QuickPass are ready to face the crowd!

QuickPass can be accessed at www.quickpass.in