Commuters

Daily or weekly travellers

Many operators have a great deal of commuters who start and end their day with the luxury of a ferry ride. These regular travellers have their own set of requirements from a booking system.

How can we make life easier for commuters?

Commuters often benefit from a fully comprehensive customer account to hold their personal details as well as those of family who may occasionally travel with them. If they are driving, they can also hold car details (make, mode, reg) for their vehicles. Within this account is might be useful to hold information for CRM purposes about their preferences and regular journeys so you can send them appropriate offers or updates which apply to them or might interest them.

From this account they will probably want to be able to view and top up their travel cards, view how many loyalty points they’ve generated so they can use them to pay for a journey or a coffee onboard, and if they book in advance, bulk book their journeys for the month ahead in one simple transaction.

No bookings necessary

If commuters don’t have any need to book, or your company doesn’t use travel cards, you will want to issue tickets, swiftly and easily. Hogia have a simple touch screen sales and check-in application for the ticket offices, integrations to gates and handheld applications for quick and easy check-in, and API calls for self-service ticketing machines. These can be used domestically or even internationally with an integration for automatic passport readers.

Another essential tool for commuters is real-time passenger information. This might be simply departure boards or website updates, or it might be something more sophisticated. Passenger information can be sent to all social media (such as a Twitter traveller info site) and travel planners, customers can sign-up for SMS or email alerts for their routes and directions at the right time on the right days, and real-time information for connecting bus and train services can be supplied to take them to work or back home upon their return.

Standard applications

BOOKIT is a reservation system focused on ferry travel and freight services. It handles the complete booking process from the capture of passenger, vehicle and freight details to follow-up activities such as invoicing and reporting. The system is suitable for many different kinds of ferry lines, thanks to its flexible route, capacity, price and yield management functionality. It is also possible to sell closely related products through BOOKIT, such as onboard services, accommodation and connecting travel tickets.

COMMUTERS – additional tools and features

As well as the core functionality available in BOOKIT, there are modular tools and features which can be very useful for commuters. These are many and varied but a number of them are highlighted below.

Travel cards

There are two different types of travel cards that can be added to an account; stored value cards which work almost like a bank account or multi-trip cards/books of tickets .

Tokenisation

BOOKIT can have a direct integration to one or more payment providers  to handle all financial transactions. This means credit card details are not kept in BOOKIT, instead BOOKIT holds a token issued by the payment provider. This keeps BOOKIT PCI compliant and if the token is store on the customer’s account, they don’t need to reinsert credit card details for each transaction.  

Loyalty programme

Loyalty points based on travel history can be awarded and later be used as a means of payment for further travelling or for onboard spending. Different customer groups (such as islanders or freight) can generate different points for money spent. On competitive routes, loyalty programmes can be essential to build a ‘loyal’ customer base.

Real-time information from Hogia

Since 2006, Hogia has been supplying Southampton ferry operator Red Funnel with our reservation system BOOKIT. And in 2013, Hogia began working to create an integrated solution utilising BOOKIT and PubTrans for the provision of real-time passenger information.

In addition to Red Funnel, the following ferry operators (both BOOKIT users and non- BOOKIT users) have begun to use Hogia’s system to provide their passengers with real-time information: Thames Clippers in London, Wagenborg Passagiersdiensten in the Netherlands, Eckerö Linjen in Finland, and ForSea in Sweden.

In 2010, Dutch operator Wagenborg Passagiersdiensten joined the BOOKIT family. They run an operation from the mainland Netherlands to the Wadden See islands of Ameland and Schiermonnikoog. They operate RO-PAX ferries, highspeed ferries, waterbuses and a water taxi service all handled in BOOKIT. Although the islands receive many tourist visitors in the summer season, it is a lifeline service and carries many islanders to the mainland on their daily commute to work.

The commuters have travel cards which they use to take the ferry. On arrival at the terminal customers can check their credit limit on a touch pad, and use the cards to touch and go at passenger gates and (capacity permitting) can walk onto the next available ferry. Touching the card checks for capacity in BOOKIT, creates a booking, removes one trip from their card, and checks-in the booking in one seamless process. When speed is of the essence this use of passenger gates is ideal. Cars have their own travels cards but here passengers tend to book their place in advance of their journey. Customers also receive an automated email when their journey credit limit is running low, so they can go online and top it up.

In addition to BOOKIT they have also bought in the integrated public transport solution which allows them to keep their passengers up to date with news of delays or deviations to schedule, and also allows them to show available capacity remaining on the next Car ferry and high speed ferry so the passengers can choose which vessel they want to board.

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