Hello everyone, and thank you for joining our investor webinar. I'm Shaun McCabe, CFO of Trainline, and I'm joined by Dave Price, our Chief Product Officer, and Steve Gooder, our Director of Products. Before I hand over to them, let me remind you about our core purpose at Trainline: To empower greener travel choices. Our vision is to build the world's leading rail platform, making it seamless for customers to find the right tickets at the right price online and delivering that experience either through our Trainline branded channels or through our travel partners. In doing so, we're making rail travel more attractive, encouraging millions of people to take the train rather than driving or flying and making them proud to say, "I came by train." To achieve that vision, we have four strategic priorities for growth.
Today's webinar will focus primarily on the first of these priorities, enhancing the customer experience. Product innovation is absolutely front and central to building a great customer experience. Leveraging our single global platform, Platform One, we provide customers with a one-stop shop for rail travel, significantly simplifying its complexity and scale. But the secret sauce is a customer experience that's simple and intuitive. We continually improve and optimize this experience, removing friction for customers while offering them access to unrivaled value and the widest choice of options. We invest in products and features that enhance the customer journey at every stage, from planning and booking right through to refunds and post-sale. We will increasingly use our data smarts and customer insights to deliver intelligent travel for our customers. With that, let me hand over to Dave and to Steve, who are gonna bring all this to life for you.
Thanks, Shaun. Hey, everyone. Really delighted to be here today with Steve alongside me. Today, we're gonna give you an intro into the Trainline product, and we're gonna spotlight three areas in particular where our product sets itself apart from everybody in the industry. You're gonna hear today about three things. First off, you're gonna hear the words "rail is complex" a lot. Rail is seriously complex. We're gonna talk to you a little bit about how in Platform One we've built the foundations to enable us to handle this complexity and this scale. Number two, we're gonna tell you about how the foundations and upon these foundations, we have built the most seamless, the most differentiated experience for our customers. We're not happy with just our experience as it is today, despite it being a 4.9 star rated app.
We are obsessive about solving customer problems, so you're gonna hear about how we just keep on pushing this further and further. Third, we're gonna reveal some features which are coming in the future. Now, those are features which are only possible because of Trainline's scale and because of the intelligence that we've built from operating in this industry for so long and mastering all that complexity. Now, Trainline has been in operation for about 20 years. Our teams, Steve, Shaun, everybody, we live and we breathe rail, which is a pretty good thing. I mentioned there was a lot of complexity, and the underlying systems that are necessary for us to be able to handle just millions and millions of customers, huge amounts of transactions is huge. Many companies, they've tried, they've entered the market, and then they've subsequently pulled out. There's a reason for that.
It is because it's very difficult. Whether you look at Gare du Nord, which is the busiest station in Europe, or you look at Dilton Marsh, it's a station in the U.K. with the very smallest platform. There are 45,000 stations, each an origin or a destination for somebody who's traveling on Trainline. Now, there are 400 airports by comparison. There's 100 times more railway stations than there are airports. With that comes incredible complexity. We have over 1.8 billion permutations and route combinations. Now, if that wasn't enough with big numbers like that, on top of that, we have to contend with over 350,000 different versions of fares. All of it we have to stay on top of because they constantly evolve.
We stay on top of it because we've invested in the leading independent platform in the rail space. That's our global platform, Platform One, as Shaun just described. Now, Platform One serves both our Trainline.com and our award-winning apps. Also through Trainline Partner Solutions, that it serves our carrier customers, our distribution partners as well. I cannot overstate the complexity and the sophistication that's had to go into that platform in order for it to handle 270 connections. These connections, they are just not static. APIs change, timetables change, availability changes. We've got a constant feed of real-time movements that come for trains and disruptions. All of that are things we have to process in milliseconds to ensure that more than 30 million monthly active users are able to book and able to travel with Trainline.
Now, with that scale, we see upwards of 296 searches every single second. As a product guy, I am just crazy about data. I love data. We've got 4 TB of data that come into our system every single day. That's 4 TB of data that are pure transactional data. Yeah, there is no streaming. There's no content here at all. It is just pure transactional data. The great thing is we are a data-led company which is building upon that intelligence, enabling us to create experiences that nobody else can do. We have absolutely a treasure trove of insights and intelligence. Behind the scenes, we also have an incredible team. We've got the largest online rail team focused on building this platform and supporting this platform. Over 500 obsessed engineers who've just got hundreds of years of EU rail expertise.
It's needed because we've got to be close to our customers. We've got to ensure that any time a new integration needs to go live, such as Trenitalia on the Paris to Lyon route that we recently brought live, that we are there at the moment that goes live. We need to ensure that we're continuously deploying every single change to stay on top of 350,000 fares that are always changing. Last but not least, with 1.8 billion routes, you've got this incredible complexity of real-time feeds coming in that we need to stay on top of to ensure our customers are aware of delays, disruptions just seconds after they occur. Our teams are primed to do that. It's not a standard 24/7, 365 job. This is not space that anybody can enter easily.
They can't enter it quickly, and they certainly can't enter it cheaply. We have invested in Platform One foundations that are so robust that enables us now to think about how do we move forward. We've been moving forward with customer experiences that really set themselves apart. I'm going to hand it off to Steve now, who's going to bring across one of those, one or two of those examples to life. Thanks, Steve.
Okay. Thanks, Dave. It's a lot of work there to master all of that complexity and to build the World's leading rail platform. What is it for? Why are we doing it? We're doing it to create a differentiated user experience that our customers love. I'm gonna talk a bit about how we do that. First up, listening to our customers is a critical component. We've got a superb team in the U.K. and beyond, and they talk to our customers. They look at the surveys and the results that we're getting in from post-travel and post-purchase satisfaction and dozens of different customer input methods. It's those inputs and the insights we derive from that that drive everything we do. Okay.
I'm gonna pull a few examples of that together in a video that I can share with you to see what our customers say and when we talk to them.
I'll describe Trainline as the easiest option. It's the only thing that comes to mind if I think about getting a train online. I literally couldn't name you anything else. Like, that's all I've ever used.
Easy to use and the only way that I don't get lost. I like the Trainline app because it basically plans your journey for you. You can connect your 16-25 Railcard on if you've got one.
It's got everything in one place from being able to see how many people are in the carriages to seeing the full journey and the platforms that you need to be on.
My favorite thing would be how simple it is to actually save money. I don't really have to think about, like, splitting the fare because it will do it for me.
Right there were some core themes there that you would have heard around choice and ease, speed and value, and also some product features like SplitSave, which we're gonna come on to. You'll have also heard a lot of happy customers, and they're not alone. Happy customers tell other customers. They come back, and they stay with us longer. Over the course of last year, those happy customers have helped us deliver some phenomenal results as Trainline's investment in product is driving growth and greater retention. Across the U.K., France and Italy, we have seen now 14% more customers are transacting with us twice a month or more, and that's up a third versus pre-COVID. In international, we're acquiring more new app customers than ever before. 35% growth in international new app customers.
These new customers are better than ever. We see two times the repeat purchase rates for new app customers versus web in these core European markets. There's this growth in app customers, this fantastic repeat purchase rate, but there's other reasons that we really believe in app. Rail is an inherently mobile experience. You know, app is better for on the day purchases. It's better for supporting the customer through their journey on the day. You can start to see why we're so focused about the app. In the U.K. now, we are an app-based business, and we see 84% of our transactions are now on the app. That's up from 54% a few years ago.
We see the same kind of growth in international and a huge opportunity to replicate what we've seen in the U.K., in the EU to drive even further growth there. Okay. Why are we getting these results? Well, Trainline's Platform One unlocks a world-class differentiated user experience. It's 30 million plus monthly active users. It's an app store rating of 4.9 stars, and that's across 174,000 ratings. It's, you know, a very solid base, not easily shifted, and also way above what we're seeing from incumbent operators. Coupled with that, we've got a very high level of trust, much higher trust score than we see from the rest of the industry. We're super proud about this. We're not complacent about it because we relentlessly focus on moving these numbers even further up.
We've got the differentiated user experience. We listen to our customers. We've seen this superb growth, this retention, the app-based business that we've become and our customers loving that app. What is it that is driving? What is it behind this differentiated user experience that's driving the growth and the retention and this trust and this customer love? Well, we because of our scale can experiment and validate faster than anyone. I'm gonna peek behind the curtain, as my colleague Dave might say, to show five examples of this. We're gonna show localizing at scale, how we aggregate all the options, how we deliver value through SplitSave, how we're unlocking the new commuter segment and how we're driving greener travel habits. Okay.
When you look at the Trainline app, it's like you're looking at one app, right? It's not quite the case because behind the scenes, we're localizing at scale, and we have this apparent one simple flow. There's search, results, payment, tickets, and 80% of that is the same for every customer. We're running an extensive program of experiments in each market, language, carrier, and use case to optimize the different customer needs. Some of those examples. Let's start with like language localization. This is really starting with the basics. We're in 16 languages, and our station picker is obviously going to preference the relevant country based on your previous behavior, your geolocation and more. We also match international names.
A U.K. customer searching for Rome finds Roma, an Italian customer searching for Londra finds London. Okay. That really is just the basics. Localization is much more than language. It's about local behavior. In order to understand that local behavior, we need deep local market knowledge. In France, for instance, we see a longer booking horizon. We form hypotheses about the optimal user experience in each market, and then we experiment with it. In France, seeing this longer booking horizon, we experimented with a calendar on the left versus a date picker on the right. We found that in the French market in particular, this delivered better step conversion. It goes beyond that. We're obsessive about trying other things. We tested months, we tested bold dates, we tested different colors. It's an endless list.
There's endless list of things that we can do to refine the flow and to remove friction for customers. Another example of deep local market knowledge being required is when we look at the behavior of customers and how they search. We have expert teams in London, Milan, Paris, Barcelona. In Italy in particular, we learned that while most customers search through the typical kind of origin destination pair, like Rome to Milan, Italians actually know which are the most reliable trains, and they want those particular trains. In Italy, we find customers searching by train number, in this case the 9630. We allow for them to search by train number. We make that train number more prominent throughout, and then we test the results. We see what that impact is.
Through A/B testing, multivariate testing, we know that it delivers higher conversion, better retention and in the end, higher net ticket sales through this local market adaptation. Dave spoke earlier about the complexity of fares, the 350,000 fares, and each carrier has different flexibility and fare classes and refund rules and more. We have to simplify that. Got some examples on screen of how we do that. On the left you'll see the different comfort levels in Frecciarossa's first class offering in Italy. On the right you'll see in the U.K, we've got split tickets we'll talk about shortly. The number of tickets left because the U.K. has a tiered advanced pricing system that encourages early bookings. We want to show how many are left at the different price buckets.
All of those 350,000 fare combinations are mapped to an intuitive set of options that deliver value to our customers and demystify the rail complexity. With Seat Maps, as we roll them out, we abstract away again all of the complexity, the configuration, the available preferences, and the cost of extras and accessibility choices that each carrier has that are all slightly different. Customers, you know, they just want the seat that they want. They don't need to know about this back-end complexity. They don't care about it. We build it once and we roll it out widely. With Platform One, this upfront investment pays off again and again as we roll out a feature like Seat Maps in different markets.
Okay, that is like five examples from literally hundreds where we leverage the platform, we apply our local expertise, and we use research. We talk to customers, we experiment, and we localize the scale. The aim of all of it is just to maintain simplicity regardless of that underlying complexity. We're exceptionally good at it, and it drives growth and retention and creates barriers for our competitors. Right. You will remember that our customers value choice. How do we create choice? Well, one of the ways to do that is that we aggregate all the options available. Where choice exists, Trainline excels. We now have carrier competition on six of the top 10 routes in Europe. Most recently, Paris to Lyon, Madrid to Barcelona. This is great for customer acquisition.
One in four of Trainline's new customers in Spain were acquired on that Madrid to Barcelona route. We see two times growth in Trainline tickets sold since Trenitalia service launched on Paris to Lyon. It's not just the product and engineering and supply that counts here. We use all the angles, all the levers. A great example of this you can see on screen is our fantastic marketing in Paris Gare de Lyon station. With aggregation, we have all the carriers, all the fares, all the journey options all in one place. What's happening behind the scenes is that we're merging results in real time from up to nine different carriers, and we're calculating the optimal journeys and fares using increasingly sophisticated data science to aggregate journeys in this way. We're doing it millions of times a day.
Aggregation is a real strength for us. You know, on the left you can kind of see all the services in one app. On the right you'll see we go further than this. When we have new carriers entering a route, it has a multiplying effect on the journeys we can offer. We can, for instance, offer one carrier on the outbound and a different carrier on the return journey. On the right we've got us combining Trenitalia and SNCF into one journey to create completely new options. These are packages that you can't buy from either Trenitalia or SNCF. It's fantastic, and it creates unique value and choice for our customers. Beyond that, price is not the only differentiator.
You'll find different offerings across different carriers, like some will offer free refreshments in first class, some will have quiet coach options. We're making that increasingly clear already on web and through search and soon in search results on the app as well to make customers able to understand their choices between different carriers. Right. We don't need choice to offer value. SplitSave is an example where we actually create value. Value is our number one customer need. It just beats everything. I'll show you the basics of how SplitSave works. An anytime single London to Manchester leaving right now, 3:20 P.M. today is GBP 184.70. But you can buy the exact same journey broken up into two tickets.
No getting off the train, no changing, you've just got two tickets instead of one. You can combine London to Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes to Manchester. They're GBP 15.40 and GBP 53.60 respectively. That adds up to GBP 69. That is a saving of GBP 115.70. It's an absolutely amazing, like two-thirds off effectively. It's incredible. I mean, our customers love this, and we make it super simple. You don't need to know how any of this works. You just buy. It's incredibly popular, as you'd expect. It's an innovation that unlocks savings for the mass market. Since we've launched SplitSave, we've increased availability from 64% at launch to now 76%. 43% of our customers have bought a SplitSave ticket. We're doing it with unrivaled response time.
Nobody is doing split ticketing at our scale. Behind the scenes, we've got incredibly sophisticated computer science and caching going on to avoid overloading industry systems. Like as an example of that, at scale, at peak times, we're returning 22,000 SplitSave journeys per minute. We do all of that with the 95th-percentile response time is 79 milliseconds. A lot of numbers there, but it basically means it had no effect on the customer experience apart from delivering fantastic value. Nobody else works in this way. It's huge value on an unmatched scale, and we invest into making it even better. Now, Split works for leisure and long distance. Dave is going to talk about how we're unlocking for another segment.
Cool.
Thanks.
Thanks, Steve. Everybody there, they got a real-time view of Steve doing a math lesson on SplitSave there. Thanks for that. We are gonna turn attention now to a segment which has seen huge change. Everybody's aware that the world of work has totally shifted. Trainline are putting themselves right at the heart of trying to meet those commuters' new needs. First of all, I'm gonna rewind everybody on this call to something which I'm sure is pretty familiar to them. Now, I'm sure you can all recall being in a station with queues like this, with people queuing for tickets, paper tickets from a machine, or to speak to somebody with pretty imperfect travel information. Well, you did that, and then you got a paper ticket.
At the end of that, you got the paper ticket, which often didn't scan through a ticket machine or through a barrier. Pretty often, you left it in your back pocket. It went through the washing cycle. Worse still, small secret, the paper tickets are not recyclable. There is nothing at all redeeming about a paper ticket. Now, the good news is that Trainline partnered with the industry, and we partnered with the industry in order to launch e-tickets. Over the last two years, e-tickets have literally taken off, fueled by both the pandemic and the behavior of the pandemic, but also fueled by developments in our app. Kind of also as well, just because customers really love it. It works. It's easy. We now have 42% of all of the industry sales going through e-tickets. That, that's the figure that Steve and I quite like. Shaun?
Big fan of that.
There's something kind of more, even more exciting from my side, and that is the runway, the headroom that we've still got. Pre-COVID, the commuter market was made up of about 40% of all U.K. rail, and of that, half of it was all based on season tickets. Back then, nothing was digitized at all. That's all changed. In the last month, Trainline have launched Digital Season Tickets, and we've launched it across five U.K. train operating companies. It's a massive moment for the industry, and it's gonna keep on getting better 'cause throughout all of the summer, we're gonna be launching on more routes and with more train operating companies as well. That entire technology is underpinned by new digital ticketing standards, sTickets.
If you allow me just for a couple of minutes, I'm just gonna kind of give you a little bit of insight into sTicket. There's a reason for it. S-ticket is a new standard that is an industry first. It was one led by Steve and a number of his team, where we have been the first time to propose as a third-party retailer, a new ticketing standard. Trainline have done that. It just goes to show just how close we are embedded within the rail industry, both in the U.K. and internationally. This new standard is a massive win for both the customer and for the industry. For the industry, they can sell high-value tickets now. They can do it because they're sure that it's highly secure and there's great revenue protection.
It's got an added advantage that there's not the distribution costs of paper tickets or plastic. Just all-around fantastic. On the customer side, kind of what's not to love? It's quick, it's seamless. You don't have to queue like that picture just before. Also as well, in the past, where you had to carry two different tickets, a ticket and a photo card, no chance of losing either of those anymore. They're both embedded onto your phone. Another way in which we've integrated that entire experience is where we've got tickets and journey information all together in one place for the first time. We said back at the start of the pandemic, it was clear that the world of work was going to change.
Where many companies, they took the decision that they had to scale back, we took a bit of a contrarian view, that we invested significantly in our products in order to prime our mobile app experience for the commuter and for the new needs of that commuter. It's been really, really working. So far, we've recently launched Save Your Favorites, and Save Your Favorites now has hundreds of thousands of commuters who have all given us their details to allow us to help them personalize their journey. Within a couple of clicks, we can really simply just book a new ticket, which is simple when you think about, I wanna be able to take that same journey over and over again. Just remove all the friction. In addition to that, we've been sprinkling innovation throughout the entire product as well.
Good example, we've taken GPS and live real-time movements of trains. We're enabling commuters to be able to easily say, "What train am I on?" They might be going, "Well, hang on. Of course, everybody knows what train they're on. Why would I need that at all?" Just think about that moment you've run through the barriers, the doors are shutting, and you get straight onto the train, and then you're thinking, "where's this train going? is it on time? Or when I get to, am I going to be at the meeting in time or not?" This feature now allows you to do that. All of those added up are helping us ensure that over. There's been a 27% increase in the number of time checkers who are now purchasing on Trainline versus the same period pre-COVID.
Now, earlier on, you also heard from quite a few of our customers, and we love listening to our customers. Many of those customers, they were talking about cost planning and booking, but they were also talking about all the experiences post-travel. The Trainline app is a companion for the commuter throughout their entire experience. It is a monumentally big task in order to stay across all of that. We've got data science teams. We've got engineering teams that are ingesting thousands of messages every single minute. They're doing it, and they're trying to detect in real time, have there been changes from what we expect? Can we determine whether there are disruptions, whether there's delays, whether there's platform changes? When we spot them, we've got to get it out to the customer in seconds to ensure that they're aware when the disruption occurs.
In total, on peak days, we send 137,000 notifications to our customers. That's 137,000 moments where Trainline are alleviating, where we are removing moments of customer anxiety. Now, that is how you build customer loyalty and customer engagement. Now shifting topics. There is one area that Trainline hold at its very, very core, something that encompasses everything we do, and that is. How do we ensure that as a company, we just drive more and more people onto greener forms of travel? Essentially, how do we get them onto the trains? There is no question that rail is green. What we've got to do is we've got to get more people onto it and convince them of the benefits.
One benefit that I particularly love, and it just hugely resonates with me is for every 1% in the U.K. of air and car journeys that we shift onto rail. We'll be saving the planet five million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That's crazy. It's also, you think about it though, one in 100 journeys. Surely we should be able to change that. Where do we start? Well, the product plays a critical part. First of all, we start with education. Steve talked about some of the basics. We'll go first of all here to a basic, carbon emissions. What is the carbon footprint of my journey? 16 kilograms, 10 kilograms, 5 kilograms. What does it even mean? That's what we hear from a lot of our customers.
A few months ago, we launched a brand new feature, which was our carbon comparison. Which allows any customer to be able to determine just how does their journey compare to other modes of transport. In the future, to compare to other things as well. Let's take Madrid to Barcelona as an example. Madrid to Barcelona. If I take a rail journey versus a plane, I'll be using seven times less carbon emissions. That's a lot. Now, the more our customers know about it, that's great. Now, another reason why it's great is that particular route was the busiest corridor for air travel in all of Europe pre-COVID. There were over 3.5 million seats on flights between Barcelona and Madrid back in 2019.
That's 3.5 million people, each using seven times more carbon than they would do if they were on rail. Now, connecting a few dots here, Steve was talking just before about the world of aggregation. Madrid to Barcelona is one of those key routes for us. We offer all the choice on that route, enabling customers to find the best price, to find the best train on this high-speed route. Now they can combine that with understanding just what they're doing for the environment as well. It's massively powerful. Beyond that, we want to encourage even more action. Focusing on a feature which we're going to be launching in the coming months. In the U.K., there are 13 million regular cyclists. They all have slight challenges in trying to take a bike on a train.
It shouldn't be that hard. We're going to be launching the capability to enable you to find a train which can support your bike, and also importantly, to book your bike on that train. It should be at the end of the day, just as easy to be able to take a bike on a train as it should be to wheel the suitcase behind you. We've got a world-class product. We have invested really, really heavily to date. It's great, as Steve was saying, we've got 4.9 app star rating. We've got more than 30 million monthly active users who are happy. I'm kind of not happy. I know we can do more, and we're not stopping there. One big area which we're really excited about is around the world of intelligence.
Now, I previously worked at Spotify, so I've observed firsthand just how intelligence can unlock incredible features and really change behavior. Anybody remember Discover Weekly? Powered entirely by intelligence. At Trainline, we're no different from that at all. We have incredible data smarts. We sit just at this confluence of all the rail supply. We've got millions of users giving us information and insight about their demands, which allows us to think about how do we innovate, how do we delight these customers? We're going to spend a couple of minutes now just focusing on a few examples of capabilities and features which we'll be launching over the next 12 months. Those features are things that we will make successful.
Others may be able to bring them to the market, but not with our scale, not with our proficiency, and certainly not with the level of customer experience. First up, we've got Price Prediction. Steve referred earlier on to value as just being one of the key. That is the key driver for customers who are traveling on rail. Today, if I buy a ticket, really you've got no idea, am I gonna be getting the best deal or should I wait? Am I gonna get a better deal if I wait a few days? Or if I wait a few days, is the price gonna go up? Our teams, our data science specialists, our engineers, have managed to just kind of take all this data, continually analyze it, and they've got a pattern now of price fluctuations.
We're going to be able to tell customers when the price goes up, when it's due to go down, and just how much they can save, thereby eliminating one of the biggest challenges for people who are booking rail. That's pretty cool. Second up, I spoke just before about the new commuter experiences and the needs of the new commuter. With hundreds of thousands of commuters already engaging with our experiences, you can just imagine about all this incredible data and insight that we've got to just make that so much richer. We're excited, in particular, to launch predictive alerts, where you'll be able to avoid missing that meeting in the morning, because rather than getting a notification to say your train is running late that you were due to get on, well, we knew you were going to get that train.
In order to get to your destination, we'll tell you there's a train earlier. Ditch the cornflakes, get out of bed earlier, and get to the station if you want to make your meeting. Finally, another example. There were 350,000 fares. We've got 500 experts in here who are constantly trying to understand those fares. It's no wonder that even the frequent traveler struggles to comprehend exactly which fare they should be buying. Through some incredible analysis, amazing data science, we're building a pattern of each and every customer where we will be able to tell them just how much you could have saved last month o r maybe for next month. Buy this ticket because it's going to get you there so much cheaper. Buy a rail card, you'll save X amount.
You should have bought a flexi ticket, Shaun, on that journey you take each morning. These are all things that we're going to be able to do within 12 months. I wake up every single morning, which is a good job but I wake up particularly excited, because I think we are in an incredible position to be able to change and to solve customer habits and to solve ultimately making rail much easier. You heard in Platform One, we've got the foundations which nobody else has in order to remove the significant complexity. Number two, we've got an award-winning app which is both seamless and differentiated and without a doubt the best in the market.
Third, we have got so much intelligence that we can only just imagine at the moment what type of experiences we can build upon this, but which others could only just crave to have that type of insight. Thanks very much for listening to us today. I'm now going to hand across to the operator to take a few questions.
Thanks. This is the conference operator. We'll now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on your touchtone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from James Lockyer with Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you and great presentation. Thanks for doing that at this time. Three questions from me, if you don't mind, please. Firstly, on the new commuter strategy, obviously eticket are better than paper, but perhaps it's maybe one step more than potentially I'd still need to do. Obviously contactless payment technology is also being rolled out, and there are companies that are sort of using that. I was wondering if you could talk about that and whether you might see that as an opportunity for Trainline going forwards. Second question. Could you talk about quickly how a new company integrates into Platform One?
Perhaps if we take Travelport as an example, how long that integration took and why they picked Trainline and what that means now for you having integrated with them. Finally, you mentioned all the lots of different types of data you get from the TOCs, you know, ticket prices and delays, et cetera. Can you talk about some of the other high levels of data that you receive or could receive into the future to help you further improve your offering going forwards? Thank you.
Great. Thanks, James. Why don't I ask Steve? Why don't you take the first one about pay-as-you-go?
Yeah. Great. Okay. I mean, I think the question was about contactless ticketing. Of course e-ticket is contactless to start with, but if it's a radio-based ticketing, we're interested in any form of ticketing that makes life better for customers. Yeah, 100%. You know, we've had amazing success with barcode and we're interested in what comes next. As applying to pay-as-you-go, we see it as kind of medium-term opportunity. Everything is made better with a world-beating app that enhances the customer experience and brings a lot of the value that we already have there. For example, some of the limitations that you have at the moment, tapping in and tapping out with a card, you can't see what you're going to be charged up front, and this matters to a lot of customers.
You can't apply a rail card and we, you know, you'll know how heavy and keen we are on digital rail cards. There's loads of other examples like that. We would look to integrate some of the strengths we already bring in order to make pay-as-you-go work in the right way. In that context, yeah, we're enthusiastic about it and see an opportunity there.
Great. Thank you. I think the second part of James's question was around integration into Platform One and how long does that take? How easy is it? I think Travelport was the example that James used. Dave, can you take that one?
Yeah, sure. What I'll probably do is I'll maybe actually step back and answer it looking from two different ends, because we've got a number of different integrations. As a company ingesting from 270 different rail and coach operators, then there's work that has to happen there. Those integrations can take anywhere from weeks to multiple months. They take multiple months because more often than not, we're using our rail expertise to actually help them and guide them through the process of working with a third-party retailer. The same is actually very, very true when it comes to our distribution partners that are integrating with us as well.
We have in our global API an incredibly well-documented, well-supported API that some travel management companies, online travel agents, they can get up and going in literally a matter of days. Others, they'll need bespoke features. They'll need things that we have to work really closely with them for. All along the way, it's something that we're working kind of hand in hand, but it's measured in weeks, at the most measured in months.
James, I think you and I have talked before about this. We're not dealing with Google standard APIs here. This is rail industry APIs. It's pretty horrific, I think, as these guys have done a good job articulating. I think the third part of James' question was around data and where we get today and what might that look like in the future. Steve, is that one for you?
Yeah, I can do. I mean, there's certainly markets where we don't get as much real-time data as we like, and we're always pursuing that, engaging with operators to get more. I think what excites me most is the data that we can derive from our own customers, where we have a lot of customers, we know their travel habits, you know, as data and we start to predict things there. Dave overuses the phrase confluence, but we really are at the kind of confluence of the industry data coming in and our customer base providing us information.
What really excites me there is how we can combine those, for instance, to learn from our customers, that we've got more experts on trains traveling up and down the country all day long, and what they can share with us back that we can use to kind of feed back into the customer experience and to enhance the passenger experience of future passengers. Loads of opportunity there, I think.
100%. Very good.
That's great. Thank you, guys. Yeah, great. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question.
The next question is from Navina Rajan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good afternoon, guys. Thanks a lot for the presentation and the interesting points. Just had a couple of questions on the international app or the international functionality. You know, you obviously mentioned a lot of advantages and of your user experience and such, and just wondering how that translates that you're rolling out the functionality within the international app, which is still competing with the incumbent TOCs there. What do you think will be the most meaningful drivers? That was just my first question. The second question is just on the Digital Season Ticket. A really interesting point. Just wanted to get your thoughts on how the economics would compare to the pay-per-ticket for that business as you roll that out. Thanks.
Okay, thanks, Navina. For the first question, international functionality. Dave, is that one for you?
You wanna take that?
I'll take that one.
Thanks. Great question, Navina. So when we look at Platform One, ultimately everything that we build gets built in a way in which we wanna roll it out everywhere. It has the capability of being rolled out everywhere. At the moment, our focus for international is upon I guess kind of the heartland of where we've grown in the U.K., which is around that kind of advanced booking, the long-distance regional travelers. We're going after those customers to try to kind of help them provide a service which is just so much better than the incumbents. So for example, aggregation.
We are the only place where a customer in France, in Spain, in Italy, can go to get an entirely independent view of what tickets are available with all the choice and all the options. Beyond that, there's opportunities for us to surface value in different ways. We think there's great opportunities there to build features that people like SplitSave that we've kinda had in the U.K. that help unlock just more savings for customers. Then, of course, there's just a whole world of post-travel where today we can use the intelligence and the capabilities that we've learned from the U.K. to take those same types of experience and roll them out internationally as well. We've got an app already. It does a fab job.
It's kind of better rated than every single one of the incumbents already there. The product development is very, very much focused on those customer needs, around getting the best price, the most friction-free experiences, and of course, sustainability will continue to play a part in everything we're doing there.
Very good. Okay, the second part of Navina's question is about digital seasons and the economics of digital seasons. Maybe I'll start, and I'll hand off to Steve. Look, the Digital Season Ticket, like season tickets, paper season tickets on a 2% commission. The cost of sale, the variable cost of sale, there's a payment cost, there's a fulfillment cost, and there is, I guess, a bit of variable systems cost and AWS cost, and potentially a bit of customer service cost wrapped into that as well. The important thing to remember about digital seasons is the average transaction value is high. Right? Although the commission level is low relative to what we think it should be, the absolute return on selling a Digital Season Ticket is pretty good. Okay?
You think about the cost of customer acquisition. One of the advantages that we have at Trainline is we have millions of customers already using our product, buying their tickets all the time. We have millions more who are using our product to get live times and platform updates and disruption alerts and all of those things. The customer acquisition cost for us of getting people into Digital Season Ticket, we think will be pretty low because those customers are already using our platform. It's a case of telling them about what a great new product that we've got. Steve, why don't you talk about so what's the scale of your ambition here in terms of Digital Season Ticket? Right.
Sure. Okay. Well, if we look back two years, we hadn't sold a Digital Season Ticket, right? Our share of seasons rounded down to like something pretty low.
Rounded to zero.
Rounded to zero. Fine. Okay. I think a large part of that was just the lack of product market fit, where we do really well when we've got a ticket that lives on the customer's phone. We don't really want to sell a ticket that you wait to arrive in the post, which you had to with annual, or you go to a, you know, queue up at one of those station machines like Dave was showing to pick up your weekly or your monthly. It's just not the experience we deliver. I think what really shifts for me in terms of the customer proposition here is the instant download of sTicket or our Flexi Season digital season ticket. You can literally be walking towards the barrier and purchase it and buy it in 20 seconds.
That kind of shift changes the customer experience so much. We're starting to see some significant growth there now and all those things you'd expect to see with better product market fit. Then also in terms of the availability, as Dave said, that barcode is really kind of spreading out to fill in some of the gaps. Like Southeastern has started rolling out barcode now. We see it just fitting really well into the market, and we want to get it absolutely everywhere it possibly can be. The aim is to get it rolled out across the network, across all train operating companies, whether it's a season ticket in the U.K., absolutely everywhere we can in the next year.
Fantastic. Look, we just think this is the next leg of the journey of the digitalization of ticketing. We've seen how digital ticketing penetration has climbed and accelerated actually during COVID and digital seasons I think is the next opportunity. Good questions. Ciarán , I think you're next.
Wait. Thanks. The next question is from Ciarán Donnelly with Liberum. Please go ahead.
Hi. Yes. Thank you. Three from myself. Firstly, just on our penetration levels in International. I mean, I can see clearly it's growing quite quickly, but I'm still surprised it's not actually higher than where it is. I mean, I'd be interested to hear your views, kind of any kind of user experience data feedback that you've got as to why perhaps there's a higher proportion of desktop or it's just on a natural progression path as it was in the U.K. Any differences there? Two, just on the Digital Season Ticket. I wonder if you've seen any differences in sales rates achieved amongst the five TOCs that you've rolled out with and any learnings you've got from kind of initial data in terms of how they've approached it from their end.
Three, I'd be interested to hear what's your view on how you could kind of take a larger share of that commuter market going forward, convert more of those time checkers. Is it development of kind of a fully integrated contactless offering or what do you think is the key to converting more of those commuters? Thanks.
Great questions. The first one, our app penetration. Remember in the U.K., 85% of all of our tickets are sold on the app, and it isn't at the same level in international. Dave, why isn't it higher?
Well, first of all, it's super exciting that we've got all this massive kind of headroom for it. One of the kind of key reasons, of course, is as people plan travel, and particularly what we've seen through all the research we've been doing, then desktop has been the place where people are planning travel. They plan leisure trips. The mobile is almost kind of the companion to serve micro moments of planning, and then people come back to the device. The second one, of course, is one of the big goals that we have to do is to keep on driving our awareness, our consideration, and ensure that we get the app in the hands of people as well.
There is a barrier before you get the app in the hands of people, so the web is a fantastic place in order to drive people from web to app. That is one of those big things that we're investing in very, very heavily at the moment. I don't know, Shaun, have you got other kind of things that you'd like?
Yeah, I guess, typically I think the U.K. is furthest ahead when it comes to our penetration. That's not just in the rail sector. It is in general that is true. I think there's just as Dave said, there's a bunch of headroom for us here, and our app penetration has a long way to go in Europe. We focused on getting our app into more and more customers' hands. We are very focused on getting app downloads and driving app downloads because we see that as a great lead indicator for future sales and future ticket usage.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're absolutely focused on getting the app into customers' hands, and we're also still, you know, we are just earlier, you know, in international markets than we are in the U.K. We've got a bunch of work to do, a bunch of development in the app to do, but it's a big focus.
Without a doubt.
I think the second question here was about digital seasons, and what's happening within the five TOCs where we've rolled out already. It's pretty early days. Steve, what are you seeing?
It is very early days. We piloted with GTR, which is the largest TOC-owning group in the U.K. We've run that through January, February, March, and we accredited April, and we're now kind of rolling out wider there. We've had really good results there, both in terms of the sales and the customer experience, but also the frontline experience. It's working for the train operating companies. That was proved on quite a large scale over several months before we accredited. We're super confident about the product now. It's a bit early to say for the other TOCs. We've also gone live. Our partner TOCs are rolling it out as well.
An advantage of Platform One is that you build it, and it's there for our top white label partners as well, which really helps with the kind of industry engagement. It's not just Trainline. It's a thing for the whole industry. It's a standard that we've retained no intellectual property on. We just built it, we benefit from it, and the industry benefits from it. I don't think we can share Northern figures at the moment. It's too early to say, but I know they're super enthusiastic about it and want to get it rolled out as widely as possible. Of course, on the B2C side, we go live at the same time, so we're selling tickets there as well.
I think one of the super exciting things as well for digital season is you just think about that relationship you build with the customer. We know the origin they're coming from. We know the destination we're going from. We know the frequency with which they're traveling as well. The ability for us to target the marketing CRM, you know, brand and really kind of focus brand in certain origins or destination. It's just an entirely new area for us to go after, and it's all upside.
Absolutely. Yeah, as you think about that season product, that digital season product, like as the finance guy, I think about it almost as a subscription type product. Make it super easy to rebuy the next digital season ticket. That's, you know. The use case that we're looking to build here. I think the third question was around the commuting experience. What are we doing to build great products for commuters? How do we convert time checkers? Again, Steve, will you take that one?
Yeah. I can take it. I mean, the first thing is about building the right experience for them. It's a very different use case when you're looking at a range of trains that you might take in the morning. You don't wanna know if a particular train is delayed. It's more like, "Well, how is my route this morning? Is my morning going to be hell or not?" We can solve that in a really good way, and we can bring people in through favorites and through notifications about their commutes overall. That's gonna pull them in, get them really familiar with Trainline, get them using it on a daily basis to make their commute better. That's gonna make it easier to convert them, right? Within that, we can make it really easy to convert.
We know what they do every day. We recommend what the right ticket is. We have a quick buy approach so that you're not retyping anything. Just like, bang, buy my usual ticket. That's gonna become a really smooth purchase flow as we build out our commutes offering to customers. I think then the other option in future, looking a bit further ahead, I'm really excited by some of the things that are becoming possible, for instance, the next version of iOS. You can get a, you know, an option where you're kind of offering the customer their usual tickets without them even opening the app, you know, and by using Apple Pay.
You kind of get to some sort of infinite conversion state where, you know, they haven't even opened the app and they've paid us. Right? A pure smile to no prospect. You know, we know everything about them. We know what time of day they buy the ticket. We know what route they take. We can recommend the best ticket, and we get to a point where we're just making it as easy as possible to buy it. Once we unlock that kind of thing, it will be converting pretty impressively.
How amazing that would be. We convert a customer to a sale before they even visit it. Like, how good is that? Right?
We're already pretty good at conversion anyway.
We're good. Wow. Okay, next question.
The next question is from Gareth Davies with Numis. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Shaun and team. One quick follow-up to Ciarán's question, and slightly naive on my part, but you didn't call out digital ticket availability as a sort of hindrance to expansion in the European market. Is that simply because you've got an incumbent player and the digital ticket availability is there? It's just the consumer's reluctance to get on the app that's the issue. Where are we in those European markets versus the U.K.? The second one is really around the innovation pipeline and sort of you've given us some examples of what's coming this year, but can you talk about the longer term pipeline and sort of how you prioritize, what determines, what sits at the top of the kind of funnel versus the bottom in terms of investment decision and how long-term you're thinking on that?
Yeah, absolutely. Good question. The first one was about digital ticket availability. In Europe digital ticket availability is widespread, right? It is all tickets, I think, just about anyway, are available as digital tickets. Really the combination of the app experience and the digital ticket availability. Of course, we are now rolling out our app and getting our app into the hands of many more customers. I think it's the combination of those two things that's held back app penetration in rail ticketing. Yeah, we consider it part of our role, Gareth, to drive that app penetration and therefore increase digital ticketing as we.
But from a-
Over the number of years. From?
From a CapEx perspective in terms of the stations, et cetera, everything's there, everything's up and running.
Yeah, exactly.
It is. Yeah. Okay.
The infrastructure exists. Exactly. It's about getting the app into more customers' hands. The second part of your question was about the innovation pipeline and, like, how do we prioritize that? Dave, we've got 500 rail engineers. I mean, how many are focused on product innovation?
All right. It's sort of the third question. I'll take each of those apart. As Shaun said, we've got 500 engineers within Trainline, and essentially all 500 of those are focused on Platform One and product development. Every single one of them. Now, if we break that apart a little bit, roughly a third of that team are focused on building the core platform, those core capabilities, scaling the platform and ensuring ultimately that it's operating with the performance we need. That leaves about two thirds of those engineering teams to focus entirely on new product development.
That innovation pipeline that you were just referring to there, Gareth, and that's across both the B2C product that we've got, Trainline.com and the apps, as well as through our other tenants that are served through Trainline Partner Solutions. If we then look at how do we prioritize, then I guess it's gonna be pretty familiar. We reference the use of data. We reference the use of customer intelligence a lot. We try and take all of that, ultimately form some insights, form some beliefs, and we have a set of ultimate objectives and key results that they span the entire company from the top to the bottom, cascade up, cascade down.
What we try to do is we try to kind of create a balanced portfolio of investments. That balanced portfolio of investments will be focused on things that deliver value for acquisition. They drive conversion. They drive retention and engagement or indeed the monetization elements of our products as well. We have all of this kind of going at any one time, and we just try to balance what would be the constant stream of always-on optimization with some bigger swings of the bat, some big bets, which some of them might return in one year, some of them might return in two, three, four years.
Just ensuring we've always got that balanced portfolio. Part of it as well is I think kind of just as a, you know, somebody who's leading product, recognizing as well when we do prioritize, that we're not so regimented and stuck to that priority. Almost kind of one of the mantras that we have within the wider product development team is, you know, we wanna ultimately kind of fail fast, but you wanna learn even faster. If things that we prioritize aren't working, we're gonna get that insight quickly, and we're gonna end up then kind of coming back to address and change the prioritization as much as possible. I suppose the final part is then kind of what does that pipeline start to look like?
I suppose at the very kind of heart, one of the things we talk about a lot is our unique value proposition. Our unique value proposition for us then it consists of, you know, essentially trying to drive smarter travel. Number one, how do we offer unrivaled value, better and better value for our customers? You saw some of it today. We're gonna use even more of our intelligence to unlock more of that value for new segments like the commuter, et cetera. The second thing we're gonna be investing in there a lot is around the friction-free experiences. That particularly comes to life with the additional choice you're getting for the liberalization of the routes across Europe. Third is all gonna be around sustainability. How do we drive modal shifts?
We can drive awareness now. We can drive a change on our product, but also how do we go out further than Trainline ensure that the change in behavior right at the moment where people have that intent and are considering rail or car in the first place.
Very good.
And I want-
Goldilocks.
No, no. Sorry, you go, Shaun.
Dave, I was gonna ask you. I mean, you mentioned failing and failing fast. I think it's kind of an important philosophical point, right?
Yeah.
We empower our product engineering teams to say it's okay to get stuff wrong, right? Because if they're not getting stuff wrong, they're probably not pushing hard enough.
Yeah. Just being a bit safe.
Yeah, play a bit safe.
Yeah.
Play a bit more rather.
Sure. I guess I'll say you're never right 100% of the time. If you are right 100% of the time, then frankly you have been too safe. As a company, we've got the scale. We've got the scale to allow us to place multiple bets and to fail sometimes knowing that we are gonna win and we're gonna be right the majority of the time. I think if you look at any big company which is dominant in their industry, I mentioned Spotify before. Spotify is a company which places bets all the time, experiments. You know, only a fraction of whatever gets out into the market is ever kind of. ..
Sorry, you only see a fraction of what we've built on, what gets to the market. We're exactly the same. We want to ensure that we've got bets. We've got a constant stream of experimentation to just keep on learning all the time from our customers. We validate it, customer experimentation. We validate it through customer research. We've got teams in all of our local markets who are just close to the customers we've got today, but also the types of customers we wanna have tomorrow.
Great. Davies, I think you had a follow-up question.
Yeah. Well, it related to that last point, really. If you took the example of Italy, how much resource are you finding you're having to put as you evolve in a market into sort of market specific products? I mean, you touched on using train numbers rather than kind of generic station. Is there much of a differential in behavior that's forcing resource to go that way or is it sort of-
From a high level approach that we think of. We think if you think of 80% of what you see at a market level is consistent across markets. Think of the Platform One, right? Think of the, you know, the payments funnel, the search capability, all of these things. They're consistent. About 20% we think of as localized for the market. Dave, just elaborate on that a bit maybe.
Pardon me. Sorry. Yeah, that's absolutely right. We have teams that we spin up for to ensure essentially that we are building features, particularly when we enter a new market, when we know we've got kind of a larger gap to product market fit. We've got teams that are optimizing, just addressing where there might be errors, where there might be kind of steps in the funnel which are just slightly out, where we need to change copy. You know, all the things that maybe in the U.K. which are now kind of, that's just the bread and butter of what we do. We have teams that do that. We also recognize through the research that ultimately everybody's needs are quite similar.
You know, they want the best value, they want the best choice, but the way in which they go about it and they achieve it is quite different and nuanced. We spin up our teams, and these are. They're cross-functional teams, so with marketing, with brand, with data, to allow us to actually kind of build capabilities that we can then roll out. I'll take an example. Retours in France or as you gave the example in Italy, the ability to search by train ID. There's always opportunities for us to launch new features that either give us a differentiating factor or they help us close a gap in terms of expectations for the customer.
Great. I've just got one eye on the clock, so we've got a few more questions. Next question.
The next question is from Saurabh Kumar with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. Was just wondering if you could please elaborate, kind of on how defensive Trainline's technology you see could be kind of against competitors who could potentially try to replicate. Thank you.
Shall I take that one for you? I think I used the word complex quite a lot. The intelligence is just incredible in our platform. Both the sophistication of the platform and the scale, the ability to just ingest and process so much data, is one part of the scale that we have. It's just really difficult to replicate. The second part of the technology as well is we go deep. We go so deep into market. In the U.K., you know, we gave the example of F tickets and actually defining standards. We're working day in, day out. Any new customer, any new company to come into this space, they are so far back behind us in one, building those relationships, but then secondly, having to kind of create that know-how and that knowledge. I know Shaun's seen it.
Yeah. I would add something. I mean, look, you heard before, Kumar, about we've got 500+ rail engineers, and nobody has the scale. Scale is our friend. Nobody has that sort of scale to be able to deploy that sort of engineering horsepower. What that means is that our pace of innovation and the rate at which we're adding new products and new features is just vastly quicker than anybody else in our space. Not only have we got this defense, this moat around the business, but we're accelerating away at the same time. Actually, the gap between us and the rest is only getting bigger.
Yeah, 100%. I think you could almost kind of look at it as well. I mentioned 270 rail and coach integrations. Every single one of those has the potential to just add more and more complexity, complexities on that or more overhead to support it to the point that you drown. We've invested in just making that so efficient, just work so well, that it's just become now almost kind of business as usual for us. To support that, which allows us, as Shaun says, to devote such a large percentage of all of our engineering effort onto delivering new products.
It's important to say those connections that we've built. They're not static. You said it earlier, they're really not static. They're changing all the time. Think of this as, you know, the Chinese plates spinning around. We've got 270 plates spinning at any point in time, and we've got to keep them spinning. We've got a whole team of people whose job it is to maintain those connections and make sure that they're fully functional. At the same time, we're building new products and new features. It's the whole point of scale and being able to deploy that sort of size of engineering team.
Absolutely. Even more so than that, those plates, they fall off, and any other company, they wouldn't even know they'd fallen off. People don't tell you they're falling off. We've built the sophistication to just constantly monitor. We've got the scale to see. Well, if a transaction isn't going through here, then something is wrong. If you're a small player, you've just moved in here, you've got literally no idea whether a service is running right or whether it's not running right. We have that scale.
Next question.
The next question is from Ivar Billfalk-Kelly with UBS. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. I think a lot of the questions have already been asked, but there's a couple more, I suppose. Just in terms of the Digital Railcard, you know, what do you see as the absolute opportunity there in terms of the number that you might be able to sell? And, and what's the commission structure that you actually get on them? And secondly, I mean, you talked about, I mean, the use case in Europe where there is open access trains. I mean, that's very obvious clearly 'cause you can access all the operators there. But for countries where there is no open access, and there probably won't be any, what sort of ambitions do you have there? And what's the key selling point.
Yeah, great question.
For that? You go for it. Lastly, I mean, looking a little bit further afield, or is there a point at which you might receive or get enough of the market share that you wouldn't actually need the full level of 500 engineers? Or do you think that there's always gonna be scope for them to keep doing more?
Yeah. Cool. Okay. Great question. First on Digital Railcard. What is the absolute opportunity? U.K. Digital Railcard. Dave, go.
All right. When we first started here, we assessed the opportunity that there were roughly in the region of six million railcards that were in circulation. Now, a year and a bit post-launch, pretty happy here to be sat here, and we've already managed to secure more than one million of those railcards. And those customers have come across with high frequency, high transaction value, which is kind of fantastic to us. We do believe, though, that there are segments, you know, under 30s, and there are so many different kind of segments that are still kind of untapped there. As to what the exact opportunity is, I can't say for definite. I know it's much bigger than what it is now.
The two things that we're really, really gonna be focusing on is, one, how do we drive as many of those six million railcards onto a digital experience that is just way better? Secondly, how do we use some of the intelligence that we've got in the product I was just referring to before to try to connect previous journey patterns, predict what your future patterns look like, so we actually can do a way better job of actually providing the intelligence to say, "You should buy a railcard. It's gonna save you this amount.
Very cool. Do you know, I think it was Steve mentioned how we use our customer research team to get insight from customers. The biggest piece of insight we got on railcards before we launched Digital Railcard was I forgot my railcard. You cannot forget your Digital Railcard because it's in your Apple Wallet. It is so super easy, and it's in flow, and you get the discounts. It's a great product. The size, the scale of our ambition here, well, like, I think we've got just a much better product than anybody else in the market.
Why wouldn't you have a paper railcard anymore? We've got huge ambitions in this area. It's a real lock-in moment, I think, from our perspective. The second part of your question, I thought, was on it was Europe and open access trains and competition in Europe, right? It was about. Yeah, you get the use case where there is competition. What about where there isn't competition? Why would people use Trainline in those markets, Dave?
I think you can look at that kind of again through a few lenses. To start with, what have we got at our very core in our products? At the very core of our product, we've got experience which is incredibly localized and just incredibly seamless. It's super simple. Compared to SNCF, there are multiple steps in order to buy an SNCF ticket. Trainline has four steps. It's just inherently much easier. That at its very kind of simplest, ease, convenience is something which I think is already a significant USP for us. Second part will without a doubt be intelligence.
Even with a single provider, we can keep on building intelligence about the wider demand pattern as well as just customer behavior on there, which we can build experiences, particularly post-travel, where we know that there's opportunities to both win huge favor, but you can also lose favor very, very quickly with customers. If we're up there just getting that post purchase experience right is absolutely key. Finally, I will say to the point about no competition is increasing on more and more routes. Even where it might be a single provider, in many cases those providers are operating with multiple brands. To the customer, is it an Avlo or a Renfe? Are they the same thing or are they not? If they are, what can we do there to actually kind of help a little bit more with that pseudo aggregation point of it?
One thing I'd say is check out the app ratings of the incumbent carriers. Compare them to Trainline app rating. I think that'll just give you a sense of the difference in customer experience that these guys have built versus what the incumbent carrier apps deliver. It's chalk and cheese, really. I think the third point was about, like, I was concerned, Dave, that you've got too many engineers. At what point do you think? Is there ever a point that we don't need 500 engineers?
I'm currently imagining that Milena, our CTO, is just outside of this room at the moment wondering what I'm gonna say in a minute. No, Shaun, we will never not require 500 engineers.
I agree, by the way.
What we will keep on doing, though, is we will keep on working out how do we drive more and more efficiency into our the way in which we build products, which allows us to devote more and more of our capacity to new product development, either for B2C or for partners through Trainline Partner Solutions. Whether there will be more of a shift to further data-led, more intelligence-based products. I absolutely don't think we will ever need less than 500 engineers.
Very good. We're up against the clock. Probably got time for one more question. Is there one more question?
Yes. There is the last follow-up question from Navina Rajan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Just thought I'd sneak in a follow-up. On the season ticket, could you give some context perhaps on just if you look at the U.K. market, you know, the amount of volumes or transactions that are made through season tickets? Just trying to get a sense of framing it and, you know, the opportunity. While I'm here, also on the monthly active user, you know, 30 million monthly active users, how does that sort of compare in terms of people that use rail more broadly? Thanks a lot.
Yeah, they're good. They're good questions. Let me help on the first one. Context on the U.K. market volume, transactions, size opportunities. Right now, Navina, it's pretty hard to know exactly. But what we see is about versus pre-COVID, season tickets are about, at a market level, about 40%. Steve, is that roughly 40% of where they were pre-COVID, about right?
Yeah.
What's your view on where this gets back to?
I mean, we've seen it growing. We've seen the commute come back. It looks different. Regardless of the season thing, we're picking up a lot of customers for flexible tickets, singles and returns as well. Commute for us is growing. The seasons itself.
I think it is gradually coming back. We're really not seeing a lot of annuals at the moment, let's be honest. We're not the product that works for. We've got new Flexi Season products where that's the first digital season product that we launched and we, you know, our share there is good, and our customers love it. I think for weeklies and monthlies and possibly periodics, like between a month and a year, they're on the up, and they're growing. I don't think we have a sense of where they're gonna top out. For us, it's been the difference between having virtually no share there at all because we didn't have a good product.
Now we have a good product, but it's like, well, how many of those customers can we go after to ensure that we've got the best way of fulfilling a season ticket in the industry?
I think I would add as well, essentially we've got a complete product now.
Mm-hmm. That's what I was saying.
Yeah. You know, the world of work has changed. People have hybrid patterns. Some people are full-time in. We now have everything that any commuter would need in a digital format on Trainline. If you need a Digital Season, you've got it. If you need a Flexi because you're traveling seven, eight days a month, you've got it. If you just wanna buy the season, the daily single or return, you've got it as well.
Exactly. The second part of Navina's question, very quickly, the MAUs, 30 million MAUs, how does that compare to a wider rail usage? First of all, the 30 million is our, is the total Trainline MAU number. The U.K. number is roughly speaking 18 million MAUs, monthly active users. How does that compare to total rail usage? Actually, Navina, I'm not sure we have a great answer for you other than it's a big proportion. I can't give you an exact number, but it's a lot. We are out of time. I guess it's just for me to say thank you for the great questions and for these guys for sharing their vision and their thoughts on product innovation at Trainline. It's been great.
Look, we leverage our platform, Platform One, to provide customers with a one-stop shop for rail. Right? It cuts through industry complexity. Sitting on top of that is a differentiated customer experience that's simple and intuitive. We're continually improving and optimizing that experience. We invest in product innovation and engineering. It's a point of difference for us. Nobody can deploy the kind of engineering horsepower that we can deploy because of our scale. Scale is our friend. Looking ahead, well, we're gonna increasingly use data and insights to deliver intelligent travel. We've got the biggest pool of customer data, transaction data available, and we will use that to drive product innovation in the future. With that, thanks Steve. Thanks Dave.
Pleasure.
Thanks to all you guys for great questions and for listening.
Thanks.
Thanks.