Digital Transformation for the Rail Industry Post-Covid-19
Rail services are the transit lifeblood of many cities and regions around the globe. They usually provide a consistent, reliable and carbon-friendly means of mobility for commuters and travelers.
The quality and speed of rail services have improved markedly in the last ten years, coinciding with an explosion of new app-based mobility services. Carsharing, carpooling, scooter and bikesharing, and ridehailing have become major players in urban travel markets.
The new mobility models offer superb digital customer experiences, but are disconnected from existing rail and transit options. For rail operators, large customer bases and quality services continue to drive demand, but the customer experience, especially digital interfaces are often lacking. Digital disruption is challenging the rail industry, and of course in Europe, the liberalization of the market means new digital savvy entrants (like Flixbus) and entrenched legacy operators pose real challenges to sustainable revenue growth for rail operators. Coupled with the negative ridership effects of Covid-19 and consumer desire to seek more socially distant solutions, rail operators must innovate to attract and retain rail passengers for commuter and long-distance journeys.
User-Facing Digital Transformation Solutions for the Rail Industry Post-Covid
- Mobile-based ticketing: A growing percentage of consumers expect to be able to reserve, pay and validate tickets with their mobile phones. The airline industry has largely transitioned to mobile ticketing, some public transit agencies have done so, and the rail industry must do so as well. Allowing this not only improves the customer experience it also may stem the tide of intermediation where digital savvy aggregators like Omio and Trainline are becoming the go-to stop for consumers considering intercity rail tickets.
2. Seamless door-to-door journeys: A growing number of alternatives exist for customers to travel easily from their origin to their actual destination. People don’t live, work and play next to train stations. To remain competitive, rail operators are increasingly realizing the need to enable seamless door-to-door journeys not just station to station. Iomob is the first company in the Mobility as a Service industry to develop an enterprise product for rail operators called RailMaaS. With RailMaaS, rail passengers can assemble an entire door-to-door journey in advance of their journey combining taxis, ridehailing, carsharing, car rental and more including, if desired, to book and pay for the whole journey at once. Or users preferring more flexibility can dynamically book and pay for first and last mile services including micromobility (scooters, bikes, mopeds) and public transit.
3. Social distance features: As Covid-19 has increased our awareness of the contagion risks of enclosed, crowded spaces, like trains and train stations can be accelerants for viruses. To attract and retain rail customers, rail operators must implement solutions that eliminate information asymmetry. This is to say, customers will want assurances they can avoid crowded stations and trains and, if they are booking door-to-door journeys, they will want an entire journey that adheres to social distancing recommendations. In the stations, we will see more video analytics technology that takes real-time information about rail station crowds and feed that information to user interfaces. Our first rail client, RENFE, has just announced plans to develop this capability in their main rail stations. This will be tied to solutions for booking rail journeys that adhere to social distance. This is easier for rail operators, like our newest rail customer, London North Eastern Railway (LNER) who has the ability to leverage seat maps and sell tickets that guarantee minimum social distance between sold seats. For rail operators with commuter lines that do not have assign seating, Iomob has developed a solution we call “Virtual Seat” which enables advanced booking with more limited capacity to reduce crowds on such mass transit vehicles. Finally, for RailMaaS services, rail customers during pandemics will want the ability to filter first and last-mile services that also adhere to minimum social distance standards.
4. Wi-Fi onboard: This probably needs no explanation. The airline industry has managed to provide Wi-Fi onboard and rail operators must support this too. I personally know people who factor Wi-Fi access into their decision between short haul flights or intercity rail. Further, one benefit of taking commuter rail over driving is being able to work or catch up on the latest news on the way to and from the office.
Covid-19 has seriously impacted every industry and rail operators have been hard hit. There is going to be a battle between the perceived safety and seamless door-to-door journeys of the private car, versus the more environmentally sustainable and congestion reducing rail services. To compete with the car, rail operators will need to invest in digital transformation of the user experience.
Iomob, which stands for the Internet of Mobility, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, offers a complete Mobility as a Service solution which combines proprietary algorithms enabling multimodal combinations of public and private services and an SDK that allows end users to discover mobility services, receive multimodal combinations for their journeys, book and pay for a range of mobility services via our client’s own apps. Iomob has won numerous open innovation challenge awards from organisations like Ford Motors, Renfe and Sweden’s Sustainable Mobility Challenge. Iomob has also participated in prestigious startup accelerators such as Techstars and Wayra and has won several awards from Newsweek, TravelTechEurope, South Summit, ERTICO (ITS Europe) and the Federation of International Automobiles (FiA).
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