License sales are up more than 30 percent since a new print and go feature was launched in mid-March at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game’s online store.
Laine Welch of Fish Radio Reports…
Nearly every license and permit is included – for commercial fishing, sport fishing, bear viewing, hunting and more.
“And people are finding they keep that license in their email so if they lose their license they have the opportunity to print it again. It’s a great benefit to our license holders”.
Michelle Kaelke is the Department’s Financing and Licensing Supervisor.
“It makes it very convenient for families and also fishing and hunting lodges that purchase licenses for their customers, and as well as commercial crew processor who is going to purchase all their licenses for their crew members They can go in and get all those licenses in one fell swoop, one transaction, and then they can print them right there and provide their family or their customers or clients their licenses.”
A new feature is personal use licenses –
“I know folks in anchorage and Fairbanks areas go into offices or vendors to get their personal use permits. And we are going live with that this week or next week so people can apply for personal use permits on line and print them at home.”
Kaelke says an E-vendors project will be tested out this summer in Anchorage, Fairbanks in Juneau. There are 1,000 vendors selling paper licenses throughout Alaska.
“We’re going to prototype it there and work all the bugs out. Then when things slow down after the busy summer season, this fall and over the winter we will be working with our license vendors to see who want to go to e licenses. So where a customer will continue to come into their store and purchase their licenses and it will all be done electronically and what’s great for our vendors is they can hand the customer their licenses, but the best thing is they don’t have to do any more paper accounting of all this information. All the reporting, all the calculations will be done automatically for them, so it will be a nice benefit for them.”
70% of the department’s licenses are paper, Kaelke says, and all have to be data captured, a process that can take months. Now, it can be instant.
So if we can get a lot of our vendors to go electronic it improves everything all around. The customer’s experience, vendor, for fish and game we’ll get information instantly instead of having to have staff enter the information months later.
Also just added to the online store – visits to the Round Island walrus sanctuary.
The sanctuary is back in action and people can now apply for permit to go visit that sanctuary on line.
A reminder – the rules for seven day ‘dude fishing’ license purchases are now limited to one per year.
Find the Online Store at Fish and Game’s home page and links at www.alaskafishradio.com https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/Store/
