Virgin Trains and Uber encourage people to leave cars at home

As part of their ambition to provide customers with a smooth and seamless journey from door-to-door, Virgin Trains in the UK has launched a new partnership with Uber; encouraging more people to leave their own cars at home.

The partnership will enable passengers to easily request a ride to the station and on arrival at their destination. When purchasing a train ticket on the Virgin Trains website, there will be an option to receive an SMS reminder with a link to book an Uber trip.

There will be a two-week testing period, in which customer feedback will be used to refine and optimise the service.

Sarah Copley, Executive Director, Commercial at Virgin Trains, said: “We know that tackling the first and final mile is critical to opening up rail travel to new customers. Our exciting new partnership with Uber is the next step in making this end-to-end journey easy and seamless for customers.”

This partnership will initially be available for customers travelling from London Euston to Birmingham New Street or from Birmingham New Street to London Euston. Within the coming months there is a plan to deploy the scheme at locations including Birmingham International, Glasgow Central, Milton Keynes Central, London Euston, Manchester Piccadilly, Edinburgh Waverley and Edinburgh Haymarket.

This builds on other Virgin Trains innovations and industry-firsts such as the ability to buy tickets via Amazon Alexa, mobile ticketing, automatic compensation for delays and the free on-demand entertainment BEAM.

Fred Jones, Head of Cities at Uber, commented: “In order to make it easy to leave your own car at home, we want door-to-door experiences to be as seamless and convenient as possible. This partnership with Virgin Train is an exciting first step towards offering customers an easy way to combine train and car travel at the touch of a button.”