Passengers traveling by bus or train in Frankfurt, Germany, will have more options to pay for tickets using their mobile phones if they are carrying a Blackberry device when using the Rhein-Main Verkehrsverbund transportation system.
Cubic Transportation Systems Inc., a San Diego-based transportation revenue collection management company, added a Blackberry mobile-payment application to the Rhein-Main’s ticketing system, which already provides the service for Google Inc. Android and Apple Inc. iPhone handsets, the company announced Oct. 4.
The new application allows commuters to register for Rhein-Main’s HandyTicket service through the transit agency’s website. Once registered, they can purchase tickets with their Near Field Communications-enabled mobile phones at train and bus stops by choosing their route and tapping their phone on the stop’s “ConTag,” Charlotte Nicholds, a spokesperson for the Cubic-Rhein project, tells PaymentsSource.
The ConTag touch point at the Frankfurt area stations provides the phone user access to all of the travel information on the Rhein-Main website and accepts the purchase order from the mobile application, which contains the payment card data preregistered by the passenger, Nicholds says.
Cubic added the Blackberry application to its service after months of testing with its engineering team in Hamburg, Germany, says Wolf Heine, Cubic’s manager of systems and marketing in Germany.
Because of German laws, the Rhein-Main system is not allowed to offer lower ticket prices to travelers purchasing tickets through the mobile applications, Heine tells PaymentsSource.
Still, pricing incentives can provide mobile ticketing in the transportation market an advantage, one industry analyst believes.
“Low value, repeat journeys are a real sweet spot for using a smartphone” to pay, Gareth Lodge, a London-based industry analyst with Celent, tells PaymentsSource. “But it’s interesting that this approach is different from the Oyster [tap-and-pay card available through Transport of London] in the United Kingdom, as Oyster guarantees to be the cheapest method of ticketing,” he says.
Rhein-Main cannot avoid a situation in which using the mobile phone to purchase tickets may cost more than buying a paper ticket because of the data charges on the phone, and that is unfortunate, Lodge contends. “But there will be cultural differences in play there as well,” making the speed of transaction the most important element, he adds.
The combination of the faster ticket-buying process with a mobile phone and the lure of possibly paying less for a ticket still could create “a huge reason for people to break [ticket-buying] habits of many years,” Lodge says.
A Rhein-Main executive believes the project with Cubic simply addresses what the transportation system customers are seeking.
“The mobile app has become an additional and simplified distribution channel for passengers to purchase their tickets, essentially creating a mobile-ticket machine in their pocket,” Knut Ringat, Rhein’s CEO, said in a company press release. “Its availability across all common smartphone platforms underlines [Rhein-Main’s] commitment to deploying the latest technology to serve our customers better.”
Rhein-Main transports 660 million passengers per year, or about 2 million passengers per day, according to company data.
An estimated 32,000 passengers have registered to use the mobile-ticket system, with about 9,000 buying tickets on a regular basis.
Mobile ticketing accounts for 50,000 tickets sold and generates 170,000 euros in sales per month, the data show.
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
