In September 2015, Philadelphia hosted the 8^th World Meeting of Families, an international event organized by the Pontifical Council for the Family. This historic event brought together hundreds of thousands of families. Over 150 nations were represented, with an estimated crowd between 800,000 to one million to have attended the Sunday Mass alone, making the event the most attended yet.

Palomino partnered with GO GROUND, the official transportation management partner of the WMOF, to develop a web portal for the transportation logistics for all private and commercial charter buses for the Papal visit. After months of development, the portal allowed trip organizers, passengers and bus operators to register, book seats, locate event locations, parking spots, and routes, track GPS coordinates of bus drivers, issue parking credentials and permits, all using the WebPal Cloud Server platform.

The GO GROUND portal integrated with Stripe and Acceptiva for payment processing, Glympse to track the GPS coordinates of drivers, as well as Twilio for SMS text messaging and real time updates.

In total there were over 100,000 passengers registered via the WebPal GO GROUND portal, with over 2,500 bus movements from hundreds of Parishes.

“The group communication and logistics innovations we introduced were unprecedented in the industry.” says Bill Maulsby, CEO of GO GROUND. “Our web based strategy to enhance the charter bus experience would not be possible without Palomino.”

Overall, the visit of Pope Francis to Philadelphia was projected to be the single largest bus transportation event in the history of North America. The Palomino team was very proud to have been the technology provider for this event and to have welcomed Pope Francis to Philadelphia!