THIS YEAR will see major strides forward for Go-Ahead in terms of ITSO-compliant smart ticketing schemes.
The group says it will soon offer the first multi-modal smart ticketing scheme outside London, and the first smart tickets
for rail travel to London from outside Transport for London’s Oyster card zone.
This will build on existing PlusBus trials with Southern Railway, allowing customers with ‘the key’ cards to buy smart tickets for both bus and rail services. It will involve linking current schemes run by Go-Ahead’s Metrobus, Brighton &
Hove Buses and Southern Railway, providing integrated travel on a single ‘key’ card for bus services in Brighton, mid
-Sussex and around Gatwick airport, and rail services on the Bexhill-Brighton-Warblington, and Brighton-Gatwick routes.
Dave Lynch, Group IT Director and ITSO Board member, says the scheme is in the final stages of testing and they plan
to launch in the second half of this year.
A new charge to account product will be launched. This will be a back office based Pay As You Go (PAYG) product (using an ITSO TYP22 IPE), with customers able to use it to travel within a certain geographical area. The account balance and journey calculation will take place in a back office as opposed to on the card. Customers would apply for this product online, and have to sign up to an account which links a credit or debit card to an auto top-up mechanism of a set cash
value.
Customers would then simply travel as much as they like and be charged the best value fare for their journeys following
a retrospective back office fare calculation.
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