Trainline is embracing mobile and crowdsourcing trends, says CTO Mark Holt
But will all of that data be a problem when the GDPR hits?
It's been almost four years since Mark Holt joined Trainline as the company's CTO. Although some of his proudest achievements include the backend move to the Amazon cloud in 2015, and various acquisitions across Europe, he knows that the future for the consumer-facing side is in peoples' pockets:
"The industry is moving online; everything's moving online. Actually, everything's moving on mobile," says Holt. "We've invested really heavily in a great customer mobile experience."
Almost half a million people use Trainline's app to get to work every day. The firm was one of the drivers of mobile tickets and has made a push to ensure that the software is ready - even if the physical infrastructure isn't quite there yet.
Part of the app is called BusyBot, which crowdsources information from passengers to improve journeys. The idea is simple: when a passenger takes their seat, they can open the Trainline app and answer just two questions: whether there are seats around them (Yes/No), and how many (Lots/Not very many).
"We sort of assumed that people would lie about seats near them, but actually twenty six thousand people a day dump data into this bot, which enables us to do really good stuff.
"My example is if you're going from London Bridge to Brighton, BusyBot will say to you ‘Get on the back of the train, because you're definitely not going to get a seat at London Bridge, but a significant proportion of people are going to get off at Gatwick and more of them are going to get off at the back of the train'."
There is a big disparity between users of the Trainline app (about 450,000) and BusyBot (26,000; about six per cent of the total). However, Holt and his team are completely happy with that figure:
"Twenty six thousand people is a lot of data, [and] we're all about user experience. Anything that gets in peoples' way or becomes irritating is probably not a thing that we're desperate to do."
Trainline continues to improve its use of big data like BusyBot; to the extent that its website can now predict the journeys of regular users. This takes factors like the time of day and their past destinations into account. For about 30 per cent of travellers, it can even pre-fill the day that it expects them to travel.
I love the GDPR...It's good legislation, it's customer-centric - Mark Holt, Trainline CTO
The terms ‘big data' and ‘GDPR' go hand-in-hand, but Holt is far from worried. He's one of the (very few) people that we have interviewed who confesses to "loving" the new regulation:
"I think it's great. It's fantastic; it's good legislation, it's customer-centric, and if people weren't managing their data in a GDPR-compliant way previously, that's a bit of a fail… We were already operating in what you might call a ‘GDPR-light' way. We've got a security team who are very focused on privacy, and slightly obsessed with it; security and privacy are absolutely critical… It's supposed to provoke those people who aren't paying very much attention to privacy to pay attention to it."