Your phone may have gotten a bit smarter today.

PRESTO keeps innovating their app. First came instant loads – a way for customers to load funds with their phones. Now, two new features that will make transit journeys easier are available on the PRESTO App.

Checking your Transfer Window

Running a bunch of errands and forgot when you first tapped on to transit? With PRESTO’s App you can now check when your transfer window expires.

With this enhancement, you can log into the PRESTO App to see how much time you have remaining on your paid fare.

For customers, this is a way to plan trips, and get the most out of a fare.

If you’re travelling on more than one transit system, you can see this information for each of the transit systems you’ve tapped on to.

How to access this feature?

Use the ‘Check Balance’ feature on the PRESTO App and follow the prompts to hold your card to the back of your NFC-enabled smartphone. All available transfers will appear at the top of the app under the ‘Transfer Valid Until’ section. To get to the ‘Check Balance’ feature, when you’re on the home page of the app, you simply swipe to the left (toward the blank card slot) where your PRESTO card balance is shown.

Setting a Default Trip for GO Train Trips

There’s also something new for GO train riders who take the same trip regularly. Forgetting to ‘tap off’ after a long day of work can be a bad feeling.

Today (Nov 30), PRESTO is giving GO train customers the ability to set, modify and delete their own default trips from the PRESTO App.

What is a default trip? It means you only need to tap on at the beginning of a GO train trip and you don’t need to tap off at the end. For GO customers that have trouble remembering to tap off, they can now set it and forget it.

Here’s how you do it

To set up a default trip on the PRESTO App, you’ll need to:

1.     Open the PRESTO App.

2.     Go to the ‘settings’ menu (the cog wheel icon)

3.     Click on ‘Set GO Default Trip’,

4.     Click on ‘GO TRAIN STATION 1’, and select the GO station (that you regularly depart from and then click on GO TRAIN STATION 2’ (the destination GO station that you regularly travel to)

5.     Click the ‘Set default trip’ button.

6.     Follow the NFC instructions – placing your PRESTO card on the back of your smartphone.

If by chance you have a default trip already set but would like to make a different trip, you can always override a default trip by clicking the ‘mode’ button on a PRESTO device and selecting the ‘override’ option.

This is important. From here, just remember to tap on at the beginning of your trip and off when you exit the train. The next time you take a train trip, your regular default trip settings will still be on your card.

For more information on default trips, visit the GO Transit website.

As we enter the holiday season, and after such a tough year, these continued PRESTO changes might just put customers in an ‘appy’ place.

If you haven’t already downloaded the app, CLICK HERE.