The quiet revolution: How mobile barcodes have changed the face of ticket retailing

We often spend a lot of time discussing significant change: debating its merits, wondering how it will happen, and worrying about its consequences.?

Sometimes, though, change can creep up on you, almost unnoticed, and fundamentally alter the way we do things.?

The quiet revolution of mobile barcode ticketing in the rail industry is a prime example of this.

Last week our very own John Davies, Vice-President of Industry Relations, spoke at the National Rail Recovery Conference and reviewed the progress of mobile ticketing over the past decade. It is now ten years since the first mTickets were sold – Advance Tickets retailed by CrossCountry, which were fulfilled to iPhones in new technology developed by Trainline and our partners Masabi.?

In the early years, progress was mixed – different operators pioneered their own individual initiatives, with varying degrees of success. It took five years for an industry standard for eTicket specification to be developed, followed by a major breakthrough in 2018, when a funding programme for Barcode enablement was agreed by RDG, TOCs and third-party retailers.?

Three-quarters of the funding for that programme (￡19m so far, and approximately ￡16m to come) has been contributed by independent retailers, via the fees that they pay when they issue mobile tickets – a great example of private sector investment in the industry in action.

And that investment has yielded remarkable results. Mobile barcode is now the number one fulfilment method, in terms of revenue, for the rail industry, finally overtaking the paper magstripe ticket. Use of mobile barcode has rocketed, from less than 3% of revenue only four years ago, to more than 43% today.

This success has been achieved, even though the rollout of the infrastructure supporting barcode ticketing is only partially complete. Next month Trainline will begin working with Southeastern and their retail partner on mobile enablement for their network. The final components in the nationwide enablement programme are scheduled to be complete within a year.

And of course season tickets remain the final frontier for digital barcode ticketing – though watch this space…

So what lessons should we take from this quiet revolution?

Firstly, how vital it is to give customers what they want: mobile ticketing reduces both travel time and uncertainty (and far more cheaply than any other infrastructure project could). Also by making it easier for our customers to browse, to choose, to buy, and to travel… they then do more of it. At Trainline we’ve found that customers buying mobile products typically go on to purchase 2 - 3 times more frequently than they did before.

Secondly, how important it is for the industry to collaborate in its approach to tricky challenges. The main elements of this success story were achieved by public and private sectors working together. We’ve seen how well it works, so let’s do it again – but this time more quickly, and deliver the benefits faster.

This revolution is not yet over. But it has already changed the face of rail travel in the UK. Together the whole industry needs to see it through to its conclusion, as rapidly as possible.

Let’s continue offering our customers the technology they want. It's an essential step if we’re going to encourage more passengers back to rail.