Bus company sees good uptake of m-ticketing solution

Arriva says new m-ticketing service has already been used for more than 300,000 bus journeys

Arriva has integrated a mobile purchasing service for bus tickets

Arriva's new m-ticketing service was used for 300,000 bus journeys within the first six months of its launch, according to the company.

The service, which was launched nine months ago, allows customers to use smartphones to buy their daily, weekly and four-weekly bus tickets, which they can present to drivers by simply showing the purchased ticket on their phone screen.

The m-ticketing platform was designed by mobile phone applications developer Concept Design Technologies (CDT) and built on the InterSystems Caché high-performance object database.

Arriva marketing manager Mike Woodhouse said that the solution was needed because boarding time is critical to keeping buses on schedule. Purchasing weekly and longer-term bus tickets requires less driver interaction.

“There are more mobile phones in the UK than there are people, and they are getting more sophisticated, so we were always aware that it is something that would take off,” he said.

He added that the solution was deployed relatively smoothly, because it was “low-risk and quite low-tech”.

“The hard part was getting the infrastructure, in terms of the ticket data that we needed to store, onto CDT’s back-office servers. Following this the rollout involved both educating the drivers on what the ticket would look like and informing customers of how to use the tool through marketing material.”

Arriva also contemplated using barcode technology within the mobile ticketing solution so that customers could scan them while on the bus, but the firm said that the cost of doing so on its 4,500 buses in the UK was prohibitive.

The cost of implementing the m-ticketing solution was more affordable because there was no need for any additional hardware on the buses.

“With this solution, there’s less that can go wrong,” Woodhouse said. “We only paid for the cost of software to CDT, which was quite modest.

"The solution has as already paid for itself through revenue from ticket sales that used the mobile ticketing system,” he added.

The solution can be used on Arriva buses in the North-West, North-East, West Yorkshire, the Midlands and in the South-East of the UK.