It pays to be a Pepperdine student. Many businesses around the community offer student discounts to Waves, but many students don’t know about them. Now there’s app for that.
The discounts, offered at more than 30 businesses, include places like restaurants, spas and clothing stores. Discounts are all made available with a student ID.
Every year SGA pays the Students Savings Corps to put together all the discounts available to students on www.studentsavingsclub.com. This year a new step has been taken to ensure that students are taking advantage of the opportunities available.
Vidappe, a free app for smartphones, was created earlier this year to channel all of those offers and notify phone users about them.
“This is a very useful reminder-type tool for people, and the students would like this quite a bit,” app creator Star Li said. “If people were made aware of this, I think everyone would be very pleasantly surprised to discover just what their student ID can do for them.”
Li, a 2010 graduate from Cornell University, created the app because she wanted to consolidate all of the information on discounts into a mobile app.
The app can be downloaded for free. The user must make an account to access Pepperdine-specific information. The app will use the smartphone’s GPS system to start looking for offers.
The settings can be adjusted so that when a nearby location offers discounts to Pepperdine students, the app will send an alert to the user. For example, as a Pepperdine student drives down PCH a message like “15 percent off at Crumbs Bake Shop a block away thanks to your Pepperdine student ID” will pop up.
Besides organizing the available discounts for Pepperdine students, Vidappe organizes the discounts for 170 other organizations all over the country. The app can show deals available to people that are a part of numerous organizations. For example if a Pepperdine student is a member of KCRW and has an American Express card, the app will display deals available for members of all three organizations.
The app for the iPhone and Android are both available for free.
