Whether traveling by rail, bus, ferry or tram, mobile ticketing allows transport providers (operators and authorities) to roll out ticketing capacity quickly and with little or no upfront cost.
If your fare collection system is coming towards end of life or you are looking to increase sales capacity without wanting to buy expensive hardware, then a mobile ticketing solution could be a great option to add to your ticketing mix.
This blog runs through the top 3 benefits of mobile ticketing for transport providers. To learn more about the benefits of mobile ticketing you can also download the Top 8 Benefits of Mobile Ticketing for Mass Transit white paper.
Benefit 1: Increasing Customer Satisfaction
Riders love mobile ticketing. No more waiting in line at
the ticket machine. Simply get out your mobile phone whenever or wherever you are and buy your ticket.
There are also the added benefits that you are less likely to lose your ticket, damage it, or leave it at home. Your ticket resides on one of the three things you check before you leave the house: Phone, Purse/Wallet, Keys.
You are also able to use your mobile ticketing app to plan your optimal route and receive live travel information, reducing stress for riders and speeding up journey times.
Benefit 2: Time to market
Implementing a new fare collection system can take months or years to roll out.
Mobile ticketing can be made available to your riders in just a matter of weeks or months depending on how quickly the process is able to move. A step-change modernisation that you can quickly make within your agency.
Benefit 3: Low (or no) Capex Rollout
Unlike most fare collection systems, the capital expenditure for mobile ticketing is not significant and can usually be scaled to meet authorities needs, no matter how big they are.
This is because there are often no expensive hardware costs that need to be implemented in order to get the technology installed.
Many start simply with visual validation, and can later progress to using standard smartphones as staff enforcement devices, or retro-fitting multi-format readers to existing gates (as done in the UK and shortly to be done in Los Angeles).
Conclusion
Mobile ticketing is helping transport providers around the globe to save costs and move away from handling cash and issuing ticket media. Adoption rates are in the rise and in some deployments account for over 50% of ticket sales and rising.
In the past, introducing a new ticketing system would often take years (and plenty of money and hassle) to deploy.
Because mobile ticketing is cloud based, deployments usually only take weeks or months to go live, depending on how quickly the process is able to move.
In this blog post we have highlighted what we believe are the top three benefits of mobile ticketing. There are however further benefits to deploying a mobile ticketing platform which may be equally important, depending on your network set up and current ticketing offering.
To learn more about the benefits of mobile ticketing download the Top 8 Benefits of Mobile Ticketing for Mass Transit white paper.
