Anytime rail ticket reduction.

Reducing rail travel costs for our transportation infrastructure customer, while retaining value for their employees.

Eight-week trial

140 users

£ saved after eight-week trial

£81,000

Objectives.

Our customer is always looking for ways to improve their traveller experiences along with reducing costs and increasing value for money.

Through our collaborative relationship, we drive continuous improvement and innovation, and our similar corporate goals support this. Therefore, when our customer discovered that a high percentage of their employees booked ‘anytime return’ tickets as they were seen as the ‘easy’ option but not necessarily the cheapest, we set out to deliver key savings.

In conjunction with system enhancements and reporting, we educated our customer’s employees on how they could secure the same journey for less money, achieving significant savings as a result.

We’ve made a number of useful innovations in terms of reporting and functionality of the service, but every time I sit down with our Account Manager there always seems to be more good ideas coming through, and it’s impressive. And they’re practical ideas that we can quickly use to add value.

Director of Procurement
Transportation infrastructure company

Solution.

With over 2,000 employees regularly booking the more expensive anytime rail tickets, our customer needed to establish an effective and personalised approach to encourage buy-in.

We identified 140 users that represented key areas of the business to take part in our eight-week trial as we felt they would achieve the greatest benefits from a change
in behaviour. Research was conducted to establish exactly why particular booking patterns existed for these key users.

Our team then introduced planning and communications, traveller and travel booker roadshows, as well as webinar sessions to inspire the necessary behavioural change.

We introduced a refunds process, highlighting any unused rail tickets.

Uncollected tickets at the kiosk were automatically refunded, saving a further £60,000 a year.
We retained a 97% user-satisfaction rate.
By working closely together with our customer, we made some important changes to their processes, tools and programmes.
We secured value-added benefits from our suppliers.
Value-added benefits helped support and nudge travallers into making better choices.
We implemented new technology to reduce the number of cancelled tickets.
Cancelled rail refunds were refunded online, producing a significant £30,000 annual saving.

Results.

The initial short trial we introduced saved £81,000 by reducing the amount of ‘any-time’ that were purchased. This substantial saving helped to achieve business support and buy-in for a national roll-out.

Added Value.

We implemented new technology (rail automated returns and exchanges) to reduce the number of cancelled tickets and encourage better buying behaviours. All the rail refunds were processed online, improving the cash flow for our customer as the money went immediately back to their cost centres.

In addition, the team introduced live rail arrival/departure board information as part of their enhanced rail confirmations. This could be uploaded into Outlook calendars and our app, delivering real-time itineraries.

Securing value-added benefits for our suppliers helped support and nudge travellers into making the right choices. For example, travellers were presented with free Wi-Fi from a key train operator alonside messages which displayed ‘Did you know you could’ve saved £60 if you fixed at least one leg of this journey?’.

By improving the overall refund and exchange processes, we created £90,000 annual savings opportunity.