Designed to satisfy one of the largest gaps in the customer experience, we are close to the culmination of an innovative programme of work from the last few months. We are excited to announce that from Monday, 12th February 2024, users will be able to see fares for the journeys they are planning. This makes it easy to understand how much the journey will cost and which ticket product should be purchased to complete the journey.
The new Fares in Journey Planner capability will display mobile tickets and on-bus fare products in journey plans across apps and websites. When completing a journey plan users will see an indicative Adult ‘from’ price for all journey options, and a broader list of applicable fare products will be available for each journey plan.
The fare data that powers this is managed in Passenger Cloud and there are several features to help ensure fares are displayed correctly to users. To display on-bus fares, a NeTEx fare dataset needs to be uploaded into Passenger Cloud, reviewed, and published. We recognise that preparation may be required by operators so these changes are being released ahead of the user-facing changes. Many operators already have access to these features because they have been contributing feedback during development releases, however, these features will be given a production release on Thursday, 4th January 2024.
This is a significant new capability involving a new dataset, so we will be assisting directly with onboarding to help you make the most of it. Your Customer Success Manager will be in touch shortly to support you with the new feature onboarding.
What will users see?
From Monday, 12th February 2024, users will be able to see fares fulfilled as mobile tickets and on-bus fare products. All fare products are grouped by passenger class, to make it easy for users to find the fares that apply to them.
On-bus Fares
Users will see single and return fare products that can be purchased from the driver on-bus. Where a journey plan involves multiple buses fares will be combined to give a total journey cost, alongside a breakdown of that cost.
To display on-bus fares, we require NeTEx fare data to be uploaded into Passenger Cloud and published. We have built a suite of preview tools to make it possible for you to better understand your fare data and see how it will be displayed to users.
Mobile Tickets
Users will see up to two mobile tickets per passenger class that are valid for their planned journey. This includes an appropriate product for a single journey and a product with an entitlement of a day or more. For users wanting to travel using a mobile ticket, they can now purchase tickets directly from a journey plan and by improving the ticket selection and purchase flow we aim to improve the e-commerce conversion rate, leading to more users committing to make their journey by bus.
At launch, all journey plans will display mobile tickets where they can be determined to be valid for that journey.
What preparation do I need to do in Passenger Cloud?
To display on-bus fares to users operators will need to, at the very least, upload and publish a NeTEx fare dataset in Passenger Cloud. In some cases, it might be that some fare products will need different display names or be hidden completely. You can do all of this from within Passenger Cloud.
A mobile ticket’s validity for a journey plan is determined based on the ticket coverage and the time/date of the journey plan. Operators can exclude specific lines and operators from a ticket so that mobile tickets aren’t displayed on multi-operator journey plans where they aren’t valid or special services where some mobile tickets can’t be used.
There may be rare instances where a mobile ticket product has complicated validity requirements or a very small targeted customer base. In these scenarios, it might be appropriate not to display that ticket in journey plans so operators can configure specific tickets to not display in journey plans.
Operators are likely to want to review how fares display in journey plans or preview their on-bus fare data before publishing it and we’ve developed some different tools in Passenger Cloud to help with this.
Passenger Cloud changes to support Fares in Journey Planner will be given a production release on Thursday, 4th January 2024. Fares in Journey Planner will be released to users across apps and websites from Monday, 12th February 2024. Your Customer Success Manager will support you through feature onboarding, however, the Fares in Journey Planner Help Desk Guide also covers the necessary preparation in detail.