Sunday, July 21, 2019

Loyalty & a fragmented transport network won't work!

I recently read an article on Wired.com about how USA-based transit providers are offering loyalty rewards to encourage usage of their services.

In my opinion royalty rewards are offered for only two purposes:
1. In exchange for customer data (e.g. give us your email for 10% off first purchase)
2. To change user behaviour (e.g. get 20% off rail fares for travelling off-peak)

However, this article got me thinking about how a multi-modal (rail, bus, subway, ferry, etc.)  transport network could never hope to implement an effective loyalty scheme if it only had one mode... in other words in a fragmented area, such as Scotland, could this work?

So here's my article on Linkedin explaining this in more detail:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/supporting-loyalty-rewards-fragmented-transport-hayden-sutherland/

In reality... of course I know it won't work unless:

  • All operators share the same technology/software/account application (and I know how unlikely that would be in a privatised industry)
  • There are ways for all these accounts to integrate together, so that an aggregated view of all accounts is possible in one place.
    And I think it is for this purpose that an Open Transport API should work towards.

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