Google Pay can now connect to your Gmail account to automatically pull in things like loyalty cards and boarding passes from your email. The feature, spotted earlier Monday appears to be rolling out to more Android users.
Don’t be surprised if the feature isn’t available yet on your phone. Google’s rollouts can take days or weeks. The company also cautions that deleting the root email messages will also eliminate the Google Pay entries, so this isn’t quite like Apple’s Wallet (where tickets are separate items). If you can live with those quirks, though, this could give you a good reason to rely on Google Pay instead of digging through Gmail yourself.
Since Android Pay was first announced, Google was on board with integrating loyalty programs into its new payment service. This feature was carried over to Google Pay when the company unified its payment services, but now we are seeing this feature become even easier to use. We had suspected that this feature was coming soon as we reported on some screenshots of it in action just two months ago. As with all things in development though, it wasn’t something that we were 100% expecting to make it to the public.
It takes just a few steps to link your Gmail and Google Pay:
- Open Google Pay.
- Tap the Settings bars in the top left corner.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap General.
- Toggle on Gmail imports.
- Tap Connect to Gmail.
- Tap “+ Pass” to add a transit card, loyalty card or gift card to your account.
Once it is enabled, Google Pay will scour through your Gmail inbox and import loyalty cards, tickets, and offers that you have waiting for you.