23 The number of rail franchises operating passenger services in the UK – companies running these franchises are known as train operating companies.
£68 million The amount First Group will pay to the government to continue running the Great Western franchise until April 2019.
infrastructure.” One example he gives is the length of franchise agreements mitigating against investment decisions. This view about the negative impact of the UK’s rail franchising system on developing new booking technology is shared by others in the rail booking sector, and has led to a continued reli- ance on paper tickets by train operating companies (TOCs).
Thetrainline.com’s retail director John
Davies says: “Mobile tickets have been available for many single TOC advance tickets for some years. But the key to un- locking this for all ticket types is gaining agreement among all train operators to offer and accept them, just as they do with cardboard tickets. This isn’t straightfor- ward. Each train operator has its own set of priorities, preferred approaches to ticketing and timescales for implementing change.” However, he adds: “We are now starting to see a greater appetite to collaborate, and I am confident this trend will grow.”
Each train operator has its own set of priorities and preferred approaches to ticketing
Click’s McLean is less optimistic that
train operators will pour money into the development of mobile ticketing due to a “lack of enthusiasm” to invest in this technology. He asks: “If they have not committed to delivering such technology in their franchise agreement, and there is little commercial gain from doing so, why bother?” Instead, he thinks the current mobile, self-print and other barcode-driven specifications will be
superseded by smart-card ticketing. “There is significant momentum behind smart cards, particularly in the south- east, where the government has poured cash into the SEFT [South East Flex- ible Ticketing] initiative,” says McLean. This route, he says, could then lead to a mobile option: “Once smart-card infrastructure is in place, enabling point- to-point tickets to be carried on smart cards – and even smartphones – should be fairly straightforward.”
If that sounds like some sort of utopia
for train bookings and the subsequent ability to track business travellers, perhaps we should remember we are talking about the famously unreliable and fragmented UK rail network.
The old nationalised operator British Rail once used the slogan ‘We’re getting there’, and perhaps one day we will get to a situation where there is an integrated, automated and data-rich ticketing system. But we may be waiting awhile.
CASE STUDY: THE ENGLAND AND WALES CRICKET BOARD
THE ENGLAND AND WALES CRICKET BOARD (ECB) is the governing body for the game in the UK, with around 200 support and administrative staff regularly travelling around the country, often using the rail network.
The ECB wanted to change how staff were booking train journeys and so turned for advice to Traveleads, the TMC that arranges overseas tours for the England cricket team. “Prior to adopting the new system, each person would book their own train travel – usually on the same day – using their personal credit cards and then submitting expenses claims,” says an ECB spokesperson. “We undertook some analysis and found that we were booking many more rail journeys than had been imagined. So we consulted
108 BBT MAY/JUNE 2015
with Traveleads, and they recommended the Evolvi online system as a way of both reducing cost and gaining access to detailed MI.” Traveleads worked with the ECB to install the Evolvi self- booking platform and within one year of implementation, the average ticket prices paid
by the ECB had dropped by 20 per cent and use of the self-booking tool was “close to 100 per cent”.
“It makes life easier for them – they no longer need to pay up-front for their own travel and they can either collect tickets from the office kiosk or via
ticket-on-departure,” said the ECB spokesperson.
“At a corporate level, we are now able to attribute rail costs more easily to departmental budgets, and to collect and analyse management and financial data. The overall effect is to make our travel budget go further.”
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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