Phone ticketing takes off

By Helen Birch

Chiltern Railways has become the first to pilot tickets based on 2D barcodes sent to mobile phones. Customers received a multimedia message on their phone including a barcode which was scanned at the ticket entry gates. 2D barcodes, which often look like frozen television interference, have enough redundancy to cope with scratched or dirty screens. Chiltern Railways sold 6000 tickets online during its three month trial period.

Although this technology is new to the UK, Japan Airlines has been using it for domestic flights for two years.

As use of this ticketing technology expands, operators can learn much more about their customers than they could before. They could potentially couple information about customers’ travel patterns (using phone-based pay as you go or season tickets) with metrics on how they use the website. Users could buy and receive tickets using their phones and without having to use a computer at all, in which case tracking the online part of the transaction could be tricky. Many phone browsers have poor support for Javascript and cookies, which hampers attempts to measure webpage use. But the real world ticket use is relatively easy to track, and each transaction will conclude with customers registering information including their address.

Camera phones have been used in a promotion by McDonalds in Portugal, where scanning a barcode in an advert takes the user to an offer website. That’s reminiscent of the Cue Cat barcode reader that was given out for use with desktop computers during the first dotcom boom, and which was supposed to be able to scan any domestic product to take you to the manufacturer’s website. The strength of a mobile phone is that it requires no additional equipment, and it can be used on the move.

With these two techniques, mobile phones can be used to extend an understanding of web analytics into printed advert response and the use of tickets. Customers might be wary of companies gathering so much data on them, but if it can be used to drive improved services and smoother transactions, they will likely agree.