Go-Ahead’s £1m m-ticketing milestone

Go-Ahead has reached the milestone of generating over £1m in revenue with its mobile phone fare payment scheme, m-ticketing, in less than 12 months. The service enables passengers to instantly pay for and download tickets through their smart phones. To date Go-Ahead has recorded 65,000 of these transactions. 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 particularly successful on student routes.

Group Marketing Director at Go-Ahead, Gillian Singh, said, ‘Over 45% 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. 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.’