M-Ticketing hits major milestone at Go-Ahead

Go-Ahead reached a major milestone this month as its bus companies continued to roll-out mobile ticketing.

Mobile or m-ticketing has generated over £1 million of revenue in less than 12 months, demonstrating the way in which ticket retailing in the transport sector is changing.

M-ticketing enables passengers to instantly download tickets through their smart phones. It was first trialled at Go North East for six months, before being introduced at Plymouth Citybus, More, Bluestar, and more recently Brighton and Hove Bus. It has proved to be a great success, especially on student routes and it is currently available on both i-phone and android.

Gillian Singh, Group Marketing Director at Go-Ahead said: “Improving our retailing to passengers while they are on the move has proved a big success in our businesses. In the past 12 months £1m of revenue has been generated on the back of 65,000 ticket downloads. Over forty five per cent of the apps downloaded by our passengers lead to a sale. It’s clear that m-ticketing as a retail channel is proving hugely popular and will continue to grow as more passengers realise how easy it is to use.”

M-ticketing helps deliver Go-Ahead’s commitment to improving the mobile retailing experience for passengers for both smart phones and tablets.

Gillian said: “It complements our philosophy of designing new retailing channels for passengers on the move, as well as the development of our recently launched fully responsive bus websites showing information in layouts that vary according to the device that accesses them. These websites mean we are starting to move away from the requirement to update both desktop websites and mobile sites with new content.

“Traditional ways of displaying timetables and routes have been fully redesigned and built with smartphone screens in mind. Go-Ahead is also launching responsive emails from its CRM database as over 53% of all emails sent are now opened on a mobile device – compared to 12% back in 2010. Responsive designs will make full use of our integrated bus and rail CRM database which enables us to retail to four million online passengers.”