Queuing for tickets has become a thing of the past as passengers travel using their smartphones

Arriva Trains Wales (ATW) and Masabi, the global leader in transport mobile ticketing and fare collection, today announced that more than 350,000 mobile tickets have so far been sold for travel across Wales. The Arriva Trains Wales app, provided by Masabi, enables passengers to purchase, download and display tickets on their smartphones, while Masabi’s Inspect app allows ATW staff to quickly and securely validate tickets using standard Android and iOS phones, mitigating the need for expensive specialist validation hardware.

ATW passengers can purchase a variety of ticket types, including Advance and Mobile Multi-Flex, a carnet providing 12 individual one-way tickets (six outbound and six inbound) for the price of 10. This means that in addition to avoiding queues at ticket offices and vending machines, passengers can also save money by using their smartphone instead of traditional paper tickets.

Since introducing the Carnet and Advanced mobile tickets, over 350,000 m-tickets have been sold via the ATW app and the rate of growth of mobile ticket sales continues to rise month-on-month.

By adopting a mobile solution, Arriva Trains Wales has added significant sales capacity and significantly enhanced real-time operational data capture and analytics. The overall cost of sales has been lowered with the introduction of mobile ticketing, as opposed to traditional sales channels. Meanwhile the elimination of specialised equipment has seen a decrease in the cost of validation, as smartphones have become the only tool required to validate tickets.

“We are delighted with the take up we’ve seen for the ATW Tickets app. Our customers have given us great feedback about both the journey checking tools and the ticketing section of the app, and as a result we are working with Masabi to deliver further improvements and hopefully make more of our ticket range available soon. The app has delivered our customers greater flexibility and convenience, and helped take the strain away from some of our other sales channels,” said Pricing & Ticketing Manager Adam Stanley from Arriva Trains Wales.