Heathrow airport is one of the busiest international airports in the world with 75m passengers in 2016. As one of the top two European gateway entry points for Chinese tourists, it has to cope with a significant bottleneck with sales (VAT) tax refund requests. These requests by a large volume of passengers require administration and processing at point of departure. Traditionally, VAT refund is a complex, time consuming offline paper-based process, requiring detailed form filling and exact corroboration with extensive, specific records and documented evidence of purchases, via a series of participating services providers.