European transport group Arriva has revealed that its m-ticketing service has already seen over 300,000 journeys made by customers using their mobile phones to buy their bus tickets in the first six months of operation. The m-Ticketing platform design is the work of mobile phone applications developer company, Concept Design Technologies (CDT), built on the InterSystems Caché object database.

As part of its continued drive to adopt new customer-focused technologies, Arriva launched a service that enabled customers to download a free mobile application to buy daily, weekly and 4-weekly saver bus tickets via their mobile device.

The successful deployment of the payment solution on 4,500 buses on over 1,000 routes nationwide (excluding London), makes the system one of the largest deployments of its kind in the world. CDTs mobile application provides passengers with tickets delivered conveniently, quickly and securely to 90 per cent of the UKs mobile devices.

“Key to this solution is being able to provide information quickly, irrespective of how powerful the mobile device actually is,” says CDT managing director, Larry Breen. “We needed to be able to transmit small quantities of data very quickly and give the illusion of broadband speed information to mobile phones. Caché gave us the technology to do this, because it provided us with a back-end thats lightning fast, with very low latency.”

Alongside the convenience experienced by customers, the information garnered via the application provides Arriva with a better understanding of customer needs and passenger purchasing patterns. M-ticketing provides the company with a direct one-to-one relationship with its customers, providing up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

“Mobile purchasing is the future for travel companies,” says Arriva marketing manager, Mike Woodhouse. “We are delighted that we have made such quick progress in such a short space of time, moving from the pilot stage to nationwide roll-out within six months, and are now reaping the rewards.”