Great Western Railway (GWR) is to launch a smart ticketing scheme on its services across the wider Bristol area. The rail operator plans to deploy iBlocks’ smartTIS PAYG Account Based Ticketing (ABT) solution, which will enable a frictionless tap-and-travel experience while ensuring the best value fare for journeys made across the day and week. 

GWR is currently developing a smartcard scheme to be trialled later this year which will include single leg pricing and capping within a series of zonal areas.

“We’re delighted to be working with iBlocks to introduce this innovative ticketing solution for our customers in the Bristol area,” said Lee Edworthy, Head of Retail for GWR. “We’re very excited about the impending customer launch of our scheme and the future opportunities the smartTIS solution provides. We have a great relationship with the iBlocks team, who have been very efficient and flexible with the delivery of our requirements.”

iBlocks smartTIS ABT back office will be integrated with the www.gwr.com website to allow customers to register for the scheme, review their journey history and manage their account preferences. 

The service is expected to be available to customers later this year and is the first step in delivering a wider scheme to other areas of the GWR network. Future plans could also see the inclusion of bus services and other transport modes to offer a true multi-modal solution. iBlocks smartTIS is token-agnostic, which allows a simple migration path from existing smart cards to barcode or bank card without changes to the core ABT back office.