Category Archives: Uncategorized

Every industry is seemingly being disrupted right now. It seems as if there is almost an inevitability about it, regardless of whether this disruption is commercially viable or not. And disruptive start-ups have to start somewhere, typically by taking revenue or customers away from more established brands. Meaning that market fragmentation is an almost inevitable […]

The last couple of weeks have seen a flurry of activity within the Open Transport group. Leading to the launch of an updated version of the API specification: v0.8.1 has now been published to Swaggerhub:https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/open-transport/customer-account/0.0.8.1#/ This version has now been distributed out to a wider group of transport industry peers for their feedback and thoughts.

In an earlier post, we showed our roadmap of intended functionality, broken into 3 phases. Since then we have discussed the possibility of adding a third data entity to the first phase: concessions (in addition to tickets and journeys). Concessions, also called travelcards/railcards or entitlements provide a discount across one or mode modes of transport […]

The way that people now travel in rural areas, suburbs and cities has changed (and will change further and more quickly) as customer needs have evolved and mobile technologies have gained increasing acceptance. Transportation users have become more used to mixing modes that combine mass transit such as rail, subway and bus services with more […]

In earlier posted we have explained how complete account aggregation (across all transport modes, private and public) is not possible, especially in a fragmented and deregulated environment. And how federated account integrations compliment the an aggregated Mobility-as-a-Service model. This can be explained further by turning the typical MaaS scheme diagram on its head and placing […]

We have previously explained in an earlier blog post how the typical diagram of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) needs to be extended to show the customer accounts of the individual transport providers. But this situation, made more complex in a fragmented transport environment, means that customer, ticket & journey information data is locked away in each respective […]

It’s not often that transport & mobility looks too far beyond the comfort and confines of our own industry for inspiration. But there’s a recent revolution going on in the Financial Services industry that has been transformative for the customer (and consequently has a serious impact on the providers). In the last year and a […]

The definition of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is not uniformly agreed in the transport and transit industry. In fact, on the subject of self-service account provision, there is a significant device. Many MaaS aggregation platform vendors and some transport authorities/regulators believe in the utopian vision of a single mobility account for all transport providers. Whereas the individual […]

As part of creating the Open Transport standard, we have considered how the data exchanged via the API will be enforced on an automatic and day-to-day basis (in other words, without human intervention).Our concern is that without any enforcement the standard wouldn’t be trusted and therefore might not gain the full adaption it needs to. […]

For those who are not familiar with the term “Delay Repay”, it is an existing scheme across UK rail operators to provide financial compensation when there is a delay to a customer’s journey.  (You can also get a refund if your train journey is cancelled) But, although Delay Repay is a national scheme, some train […]