Air, Metro Ticketing Fuel Growth
The report - Mobile Ticketing Strategies: Air, Rail, Metro, Sports & Entertainment 2013-2018 - noted that the airline industry was a particularly strong proponent of mobile ticketing, with adoption of mobile boarding passes rising sharply since the worldwide implementation of BCBPs (Barcoded Boarding Passes) in 2010.
Furthermore, it observed that while mobile has for some years been a key ticketing delivery channel across Scandinavian metros, deployments were increasing both elsewhere in Europe and in the US and were achieving strong levels of adoption. At Boston’s MBTA, which introduced mobile ticketing in late-2012, mobile accounted for 10% of ticket sales within seven weeks of launch.
NFC Deployments Limited
However, the report noted that in the short term, the outlook for NFC ticketing was less optimistic, with a lack of implementation standards a key barrier to interoperability. Furthermore, transaction speed targets have yet to be achieved, providing a further obstacle to widespread deployments and increasing the probability that contactless cards, rather than NFC handsets, will be the primary delivery mechanism.
As report author Dr Windsor Holden observed, “We had already scaled back our forecasts for NFC Ticketing deployments in the wake of Apple’s decision not to include an NFC chipset in the iPhone 5. Given the outstanding technical issues and the continuing failure of NFC stakeholders to communicate the value proposition to transport operators, further downward revisions were required; we do not envisage anything other than ad hoc deployments in the immediate future.”