Looking to collaborate on a multi-operator ticketing scheme with fare capping?

Our bus ticketing and payments specialists will be on hand at Transport Ticketing Global (London Olympia, March 7-8) to talk through its solution, and explore the challenges and opportunities of Project Coral’s local authority multi-operator initiatives.

We’ll be demonstrating our transport ticketing and payments platform at the event – including account-based ticketing and open payment modules. We will also give a first glimpse of our revenue apportionment service, which unlocks multi-operator capping capability.

Paul Rogers, Head of Sales & Marketing at Flowbird Transport Intelligence, says, “These solutions are vital enablers of the National Bus Strategy and the DfT’s initiative for multi-operator, account-based ticketing systems. We’re looking forward to demonstrating our complete system at TTG, including exciting new functionality that responds to bus operators’ and local authorities’ needs for more connected, simplified, value-added services.”

Increasing bus patronage

In a recent Bus & Coach Buyer feature, Flowbird’s bus team was asked to share its perspective on the technology development the next year will bring, and to give insight into how we’re responding to bus operators’ needs.

We predicted that contactless open loop payment adoption will continue to grow in 2023 and beyond, driven by the convenience and ease of tap to pay, in combination with the widespread migration ‘from cash to tap’, which was accelerated by the pandemic.

Here’s what Nabeel Alibhai, Business Development Manager at Flowbird had to say about the trends we’ve seen in our own deployments and how we’ll be working with operators to meet demand.

“For bus operators, we see the year ahead being about increasing patronage, exploring new revenue streams and improving operational efficiency. We also expect growth in account-based ticketing and open payments, particularly in areas where Enhanced Partnerships exist, to play a role in improving passenger experience and boosting ridership.

“For local transport authorities, the challenge is to create the conditions for greater confidence in bus services – for example, through the implementation of Bus Service Improvement Plans – while meeting wider sustainability and mobility goals. Increasingly, this will mean connecting the dots between public transport and other urban mobility services using account-based ticketing, open payments and mobility-as-a-service solutions.”

Flowbird has seen a clear customer preference for, and rapid adoption of, open payments in two key deployments. Following a launch on buses in Edinburgh in July 2019, there have already been over 60 million taps by four million unique users.

The speed at which bus riders took to the technology was incredible and, after three years, half of transactions were made using contactless EMV payments. In Belfast, after a staggered launch across the bus fleet, Flowbird’s account-based ticketing with open payments reached a milestone of one million journey taps within the first few months.

Integrated ticketing and payments

Flowbird’s bus ticketing team is also focused on integration as a driver for technology, innovation and productivity in the UK. For example, by standardising APIs to enable integration to ticketing and payments infrastructure by third-party applications. This could be for journey planning, AVL, telematics and business information.

Says Nabeel: “Our CloudFare back-office is multi-operator and multimodal and caters for a wide range of operations and services, whether managed by local authorities or operators. It provides control over ticketing, payments, fare configuration and asset management. It can also give operators the ability to manage multiple third-party systems via a single sign-on.”

Deep dive into bus ticketing at TTG

At Transport Ticketing Global, in addition to our ABT and open payments offer, we’ll be showcasing our white label mobility-as-a-service app, which is used in Monaco under the Monapass name. This MaaS solution integrates public and private transport ticketing and payments, travel subscriptions, journey planning and bookings for parking and leisure services in one, single sign-in app.

Want to know more? Drop us a line.