UK: Policy changes and technical developments which could boost ridership by making it easier to buy train tickets were discussed when representatives of independent retailer Trainline and distribution technology company SilverRail were questioned by the House of Commons Transport Committee on May 8 as part of its scrutiny of the government’s draft Rail Reform Bill.
Differences of opinion
Last year, the government announced that it would not proceed with its proposal to create a centralised ticket retailing platform. John Davies, Vice-President of Industry Relations at Trainline, said the Labour opposition has also indicated it would not create one.
Davies welcomed this decision, saying a central platform would be ‘state backed vertically integrated monopoly’ and not enough thought had been given as to how it would operate.
In contrast, Cameron Jones, Chief Strategy & Commercial Officer at SilverRail Technologies UK, said ‘we were shocked’ that the plan will not go ahead, as he believes it would have driven innovation by providing more competition.
Jones said people would see Great British Railways branding at stations and on ticket machines, and he believes there should also be a GBR retail website ‘otherwise you’d find very confused consumers wondering where they buy tickets’. He said ‘every country in the world’ which sells rail tickets has a national website and it would ‘a real step forward’ for the UK.
Driving innovation
Jones said a GBR site would not squeeze out third-party retailers, pointing to experience in the wider travel sector where service providers and intermediaries are ‘pushing each other to drive more innovation to drive a better service for customers’.
Trainline’s Davies said retailers can differentiate themselves by the services offered. He said Trainline is successful ‘because it serves customers in a way that customers respond to and they respond in terms of repeat purchase’ and ‘we are kept on our toes’ by rivals including Uber, Virgin and Trip.
He said third-party retailers now collect approximately half of all passenger income, but substantial resources are needed to enter the market, and companies need stability and an assurance that they can compete fairly.
He said there are around 10 independent retailers plus the train operators, but expressed concern that the Rail Delivery Group both grants licences to sell tickets, and acts as a member’s association.
‘We see areas where train operators are acting in ways that are self-preferencing’, he said, saying certain fares, products and features are withheld from other retailers and operators offer discounts outside ‘an economical window’ that is viable for third party sellers. He said rail reform should address this so everyone is operating under the same framework.
SilverRail’s Jones said low commission payments are a barrier for new entrants, which have to operate at a large scale to justify the investment needed.
He suggested retailers could be offered different commission payments for different trains, times, products, markets and channels, ‘so it is not a blanket approach’ but is ’about how to be smarter about your operation to run a more profitable business’.
Make it easier
Jones said making it easier to buy tickets would get more people out of cars and planes into trains. He called for fare simplification to make the system easier to understand, for Transport for London to accept barcode tickets, which would remove much of the current need for paper tickets, and for tickets to be sold in high street shops which could help the unbanked and offline.
Davies said Transport for London’s Oyster smartcard had demonstrated that people travel more often if payment is made easier, and at Trainline ’what we have seen is that where customers use their mobile devices to buy tickets they then tend to do so more often’.
Looking at technology, he said ‘it took us 10 years to get the availability of digital mobile tickets across the industry. And these things move much more slowly than they should.’
In particular, ‘we have been trying for three years to expedite the availability of digital season tickets’. He called for a common barcode standard to support digital season tickets, which he believes could encourage a return of the commuting traffic lost because of the pandemic. He said people now change their habits, place of work and where they live more than in the past, and do not want to ‘commit several thousands of pounds upfront’ to get the best available discount.
Looking at the big picture, Jones said ’it’s about filling trains, and most of the trains are not full at the moment’.
