$500K A Year For Company Behind Troubled Papal Pass Website: Report

By Justin Heinze:

The web consulting company that designed and built the Papal pass website gets paid $500,000 per year by SEPTA, according to a Philly.com report.

The Papal page created by CapTech Consulting Inc. crashed minutes after it was launched on Monday morning. CapTech has a three year contract with SEPTA, the report states, and the papal site alone costs $84,520.

SEPTA announced two weeks ago that anyone who wanted to ride Regional Rail on September 26 and September 27 was required to buy the passes, and that any other tickets would not be usable.

About 54,000 customers visited the site within the first minute that it opened. The traffic was too much for the site to handle, SEPTA said.

SEPTA will decide by Monday if they will continue to use the vendor or if they will look for outside help, the report states.

CapTech is looking for a way to limit the amount of buyers who can use the site at any one given time so the system is not similarly overwhelmed, according to the report.

SEPTA said that only 201 passes were sold on Monday out of the 175,000 that are available for each day.

“We will continue to evaluate the best option for us to move forward with the sale of the Papal Passes,” SEPTA said in a statement. “We may continue to work with the IT consultants to improve the e-commerce site; we are also considering working with an outside vendor to sell the passes for us.

SEPTA will continue to provide information about when the passes will be available.

“The most important consideration for SEPTA is to manage the volume of users coming to the site, and to make sure that the passes are purchased by those who want to come to see the pope, or need to travel for work and other regular commuting needs,” the statement said.