RAIL BY GARY NOAKES
All well and good, but don’t expect paper tickets to disappear any time soon. Following privatisation, our railways are a disparate set of companies all doing their own thing. If there is one area where state ownership would score over privatisation, it is surely having a common approach to technology. Moreover, it is easy to introduce the electronic gates needed to read them at the 27 or so major airports in the UK, but another thing to have them spread across thousands of train stations. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which speaks for the railway system as a whole, is currently overseeing a pilot scheme cover- ing more than 230 stations in the north of England, Scotland and the Midlands that lets people switch between different train operators’ services on a single journey using m-tickets. Until now, m-tickets have been limited for use only on one specific train operator’s services. That’s the good news, but the bad news is that the RDG only says it wants m-ticketing available nationwide “as soon as possible”, and adds that this “could be” within three years. The view from the corporate travel world is sceptical as to when this will actually happen. “I wouldn’t like to put a times-
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The need for change is evident, given the growing usage of our railways
cale on it,” says Jon Reeve, Evolvi’s trade relations director. “So many operators are impacted by franchise length and other issues associated with investment. It’s dif- ferent in the airline world because IATA guides it and you have global investment. I think we’ll still be using orange tickets for the next two- to-five years because they are currently the only ticketing that will get you from anywhere to anywhere.” That’s not to mention the further difficulties created once you factor in pan-European rail travel. There’s a long way to go, but in the latter case, there have been strides made here as well, with booking tools, such as the Amadeus Air-Rail Display, effectively acting as a global distribution system (GDS) for both rail and air within
Europe, offering fare comparisons between the two. As yet, however, it only works for point-to-point journeys. On the buying side, having rail purchase data at your fingertips should make it easier to control spend, and to ensure compliance and pre-trip authorisation. Furthermore, having a booking tool that mirrors those used in the airline world allows you to compile accurate data on specific spend, which is a valuable bargaining tool when seeking deals with train operators.
BASIC BOOKING Reeve says buyers generally ask for three basic things from their rail booking systems: trip authorisation; approval around a price point; and flexibility around compliance. This latter request means things can get complicated, such as instances when advance first class tickets are cheaper than standard second class fares because the lower fare category has sold out. Having overrides built into booking systems for this and other occurrences, such as travel- lers who purchase an advance ticket for the outward journey but a flexible ticket for the return leg, in case of a meeting overrun, is a necessity. Attribution is another issue, with
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