Rail is on the rise, but how best to persuade the traveller to book online when tickets-on-demand are still seen as the norm?
The UK's rail sector has boomed over the past decade, both in terms of passenger numbers and journeys taken, and an increasingly higher proportion of those taking the train are business travellers, some of whom have booked their ticket through their travel management company (TMC) or via their company’s self-booking tool.
More and more bookings for leisure and business travellers are moving online, driven to an extent by high-profile TV advertising campaigns from Thetrainline.com and Redspottedhanky, promising significant savings for advance booking. But witness the queues at the booking office of most mainline stations and you realise that many people didn’t get the memo. Tickets-on-demand (TOD) – the mortal enemy of TMCs, buyers and procurement departments alike – are still very much the default mode of purchase.
Demanding behaviour
Margaret Birse, global travel director for Serco, explains that the business has focused “on driving behaviour away from tickets-on-demand”. She adds: “Almost all trips have at least a few days’ notice, so these should be bought in advance. But it is difficult because travellers still think about buying a train ticket at the station, whereas no-one would think of turning up at the airport and buying a flight from the sales desk.”
In 2013, Serco started working with Business Travel Direct (BTD). So pleased were both parties with the arrangement that they issued a joint white paper, going into details about the theory and practice of their new relationship. Put simply, Serco manages its own travel in-house but is supported by the TMC. For example, BTD collects the management information from bookings, but the analysis is done by Serco’s dedicated travel specialists.
Rail was the exception to this, handled on a stand-alone basis by BTD, which was tasked with driving the behavioural change towards advance bookings. “It was difficult for us to see how we could add value to the rail-booking process, and the SBTs [self-booking tools] at the time were not at the level we needed them to be for integration into the back office,” says Birse.
However, perhaps as an indication of improved functionality, this arrangement is changing soon, with Serco employees now able to book their train ticket through Thetrainline.com on Concur. Birse acknowledges that this set up makes it easier for Serco to apply and police a rail policy. The company does not allow its employees to travel first class and, although exceptions can be built in, this is the cornerstone of its rail policy.
“We need to avoid the situation where we have two people on the same train going to the same meeting, one of whom has booked a second class ticket in advance, through the corporate tool within policy, while the other is using a personal credit card to buy a first class ticket at the booking office and then trying to get it through on expenses,” she says. “We have a flat organisation and our travel policy should reflect this.”
Number crunching
Rail booking specialist Evolvi claims market leadership in the UK corporate rail booking space. Information released at the Business Travel Show this year claimed 59 per cent of total UK corporate agency rail business was booked through its Evolvi-ng platform, a 4 per cent increase on 2012’s market leading share. The rail ticket revenues in 2013 came in at almost £397 million, out of a total market figure provided by the Rail Settlement Plan of £673 million.
Evolvi’s trade relations director, Jon Reeves, explains that the company was formed in 2005, emerging out of a TMC. “We noticed that a lot of business travellers were using the train, and there was a need to develop a product specifically for corporates,” he says. “It needed to offer booking as well as compliance, access to management information and a choice of fulfilment. Adopting a B2C [business-to-consumer] approach would not have worked – it needed specialist insight.”
However, one of those B2C firms is Thetrainline.com, and it had a corporate travel team as long ago as 2001. Ian Cairns, its director of distribution, credits its B2C credentials with helping it to service road warriors. “The CRM [customer relationship management] tools we have developed for the leisure traveller are an important part of driving buyer behaviour towards advance purchase, and we can apply this insight to the corporate world as well,” he says.
Innovations
The principles of rail booking are comparable with air, according to Tony D’Astolfo, managing director for travel industry research specialist Phocuswright. D’Astolfo is a well-known name in business travel circles, following stints with United Airlines, Get There and Rearden, among others. He says: “The questions over rail travel are the same as for most business trips: how do I book it, how is the booking reported and what is the travel experience like?”
Phocuswright’s European conference, taking place in Dublin in May, includes a Travel Innovation Summit. Here, 30 or so new businesses present their product to an audience of analysts and investors, with the winning innovation given a slot at the main conference. “I haven’t seen the submissions for Dublin yet,” D’Astolfo says, “but there is a history of rail featuring as part of a multi-modal booking product. We’re seeing a lot of businesses, like Rome2rio, getting a lot of attention for integrating rail into a multi-category booking environment.”
Innovations exist elsewhere. Martin Danzl is manager of rail supply commerce at Sabre Travel Network, and he draws attention to a tool Sabre has launched with SNCF.
“We developed this tool [called Sabre Rail SNCF] in-house,” he explains. “Going through an app was the best way for us to distribute SNCF graphically, and the app was also the slickest means of integrating SNCF content into Sabre.” The tool is available globally to any licensed agent using Sabre Red Workspace.
Connections
The global distribution systems’ (GDS) approach to rail reinforces their repositioning as travel technology providers rather than just travel distributors. In the UK, Sabre and Travelport both work with the Thetrainline.com and Evolvi. The two rail specialists carry out the heavy lifting by accessing the rail content, allowing Sabre and Travelport to link to the aggregators using API (application programming interface) technology.
Simon Ferguson, UK and Ireland managing director for Travelport, says: “The difficulty with rail is that there’s little standardisation in terms of the technical infrastructure across the various train operating companies, so what we would need to integrate is difficult, to say the least – which is why we work with the aggregators.”
Travelport’s Universal API is driving the integration and providing the link from the aggregator to the corporate or TMC via the corporate booking tool.
Ferguson adds: “Rail is important to us because it’s important to our customers. Clients such as BSI Capita have a lot of domestic business travel, and rail is a big part of that. What the TMCs want is to manage the complexity and ensure that rail bookings are quick and efficient, with manual input minimised and less steps in the process.”
Negotiated rates are another aspect of rail booking which falls short in the eyes of the buyer. “Most train companies have a monopoly on certain routes, so they are reluctant to discount when there isn’t an alternative,” says Ferguson. “If the buyer can show, for example, that a deal will stop people driving and get them on the train, then some are willing to listen, maybe offering soft benefits rather than better deals. Generally, the train operating companies need to mature to the needs of the corporate travel world.”