Introducing: Platform One

At Trainline, our purpose is to empower people and help them make greener travel choices.

As governments in the UK and across Europe wrestle with their targets for net zero emissions by 2050, transport has a crucial role to play. In the UK, transport is the largest contributor to domestic greenhouse gas emissions, contributing 28% of domestic emissions. Similarly, in Europe transport accounts for more than a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.?

The majority of these emissions are from road transport – which is why promoting rail can make a real difference. Collectively we must put rail at the heart of more journeys.

But there are some hurdles we need to overcome.

Passengers crave simplicity and the certainty they are getting best value. In the UK, we know the fares system is complicated and can cause confusion. In Europe, there is growing competition between different train operators – great news for customer choice, but additional complexity for journey planning.

For carriers, the challenge is to maximise their customer reach, and ensure their product – rail travel – really stands out in the shop window.?

We need to be able to retail rail simply and seamlessly, and make it attractive to travellers when they are deciding on their journey. This requires cutting-edge retail technology, which is flexible, reliable, constantly updated and has world-class security. And it needs to be accessible to multiple parties, operating in different markets with different priorities.

That’s why today is an exciting day for us, because we’re ready to reveal to the world the new identity for the technology that powers everything we do here at Trainline: Platform One.

So what is Platform One??

For us, it is more than “just” a tech platform; it hosts multiple tenants and helps them to address the fundamental issues facing rail in the UK and Europe.?

Passengers have been enjoying some of the benefits of Platform One for years.?Trainline itself is one tenant of Platform One, with the technology powering the Trainline.com website and app. Money-saving features like SplitSave ticketing, Ticketing Alerts and Delay Repay notification have been developed by Trainline using Platform One’s technology.

But that’s only the start of Platform One’s story, because its reach stretches far beyond our own direct retail channels.?

We have discussed before how Platform One provides multiple tenants with flexible tech cost-effectively. In the UK a number of train operators power their own branded websites and apps through Platform One – and we’re now working with European operators too. In the business travel market, Platform One is integrated behind the scenes into a growing number of Business Travel Companies and Online Booking Tools. And our thousands of direct business customers will be migrating to Platform One in the near future too.

We’ve spent years investing in and innovating Platform One, developing it into proven tech which has unrivalled scale, agility, and capability. We’re constantly innovating, developing new features like multi-modal journeys and expanding into new markets. And we believe it has something to offer everyone who has an interest in seeing rail flourish.

So welcome to Platform One. We hope you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months and years.

Because this is the retail technology that’s powering the future of rail.