Making rail booking easy for all

Loco2 is the first independent, non rail operator owned company to sell train tickets to destinations within Europe. The company has been featured in the Guardian, Observer and Wired.co.uk and has recently launched a partnership with popular train booking site, Seat61.com. Jamie Andrews, Co-founder and Managing Director, talks to Global Railway Review about how it all started, where they are now, and Loco2’s ambitious plans for the future.

You only have to make a quick sweep of online travel forums to see that even in these en – ightened times, European train ticket booking is rather stuck in the dark ages. Questions from would-be train travellers show that when it comes to booking rail journeys across the continent, unlike flying, the process is far from simple.

Myriad train companies, schedules, ticket types and prices in a multitude of languages means customers are forced to navigate endless sites across the web to book tickets from A to B. When flight price comparison engines make the equivalent journey by air relative child’s play, it’s no wonder that only the most die-hard train travellers don’t give up the process half way through.

The lack of resources catering for those seeking alternatives to flying, and a long-held passion for slow travel, were the prime motivators behind my sister Kate and I founding Loco2. After several years of blood sweat and tears, and recent investment that has enabled us to build a sophisticated technical team, we’re finally making headway in tackling the challenge of making rail booking easy for all.

Multi-modal aspirations

Back in 2007, we set out with a vision for a onestop shop for low carbon travel. We wanted to provide a comprehensive journey-planning tool covering trains to buses to boats, for customers concerned about their travel carbon footprint. As a business starting in the 21st century it was clear that our focus should be online, and our first step was to build a basic website to showcase our brand concept. Loco2 is a reference to a new era of locomotive travel, as well as being an abbreviation for ‘low CO2’.

After an initial period of research we realised that this was too ambitious. Enabling proper multi-modal journey-planning is something that even Google struggles with, due to the fragmented nature of the datasets required to bring all the transport modes into one user interface.

In our experience of train travel, Kate and I realised that there were significant customer challenges that needed solving, so we reduced the scope of the business to focus solely on European rail journey-planning and booking (leaving the more ambitious task to when we are bigger than Google!).

A focus on great usability

We’ve put a premium on fantastic usability, great design and simplicity. The biggest problem that we identified from a customer’s perspective was the usability of websites that offer international train tickets. It was clear from our own experience that significant improvements could be made, and that there was a big gap between the ease of booking rail versus flights. A study from Responsibletravel.com further backed up our assumptions, showing that for train bookings for destinations within Europe, only 33% of customers surveyed could work out how to make a purchase, versus a 98% success rate for equivalent flights.

An agile development manifesto

From 2007-2010, I worked for a number of different web technology companies and learned a lot about the concept of user-centred design and agile software development. As we began prototyping our first software in 2009 I applied these lessons to Loco2. The basic agile principle says that software should be designed with a user’s needs clearly defined, and with as much real world testing as possible. The mantra of one of the leading agile software companies I was learning from during this time was ‘release early, release often’, suggesting that putting something in front of customers and learning from how they use your software is more important than waiting until everything is 100% perfect.

In 2011, after learning from our mistakes during the prototyping and user testing process, our fledgling technical team built our first piece of proper booking software, releasing it in ‘beta’ in February 2011 at www.loco2.co.uk. During the beta phase we experimented with a number of different datasets so that we could tackle some of the problems identified, such as lack of comprehensive timetable/route data when planning sophisticated itineraries.

We wanted users to be able to see their different route options clearly on a map so that they could easily choose logical places to stop off on the way to their destination, or build logical itineraries when using InterRail passes. Building these route-planning maps required the development of geo-coding software to use with station/location names, and the use of mapping services such as the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API).

Opening up data for the better

Getting hold of the right timetable and route data legitimately was and remains a big challenge for a start-up technology company like Loco2. In the UK a debate has been raging for some time about ‘open data’ for rail. National Rail Enquiries/ATOC in particular has been criticised for stifling innovation by not providing ready access to data over the past few years. However, thanks to various efforts by the Government and the rail industry itself, the UK is now leading Europe in opening up data, with countries like the Netherlands and France now following suit.

At Loco2 we believe that further opening up of data at a European level can catalyse positive change in a market that is largely seen as stagnant. It would certainly make achieving our objectives easier, and could unleash a whole of wave of train travel from customers who are used to the ease of booking available for cheap flights.

There are some significant efforts being made at an EU regulatory level, with the passing in May 2011 of legislation leading to the development of the TAP-TSI technical specifica – tion to encour age data interoperability between rail operators. The efforts of the TAP-TSI project may lead to interesting results, but there are a lot of barriers to overcome, many of them political and relating to competing rail operator interests, and the changing role of the UIC and European Railway Agencies.

Whilst the notion of ‘open European rail data’ may still be some way off, we are keen to connect with individual companies to integrate their data feeds and booking systems with our front-end website. So far we are working with Rail Europe, the UK subsidiary of French operator SNCF. By connecting to Rail Europe’s ‘Euronet’ distribution system, we’re able to offer tickets to hundreds of French stations in addition to Eurostar, as well as numerous other European destinations (though at higher prices than elsewhere).

Staying ahead with the Engine Room forum

One of the big challenges that our business faces is that with all the resources of the internet at their fingertips, customers are savvy about how to save money and get the best deal, even if that means booking on a website that’s not in English. Seat61.com does a fantastic job of advising where to book the best deals for different countries, and a huge number of customers will not make a purchase without first consulting the ‘Man in Seat 61’. For this reason, we’ve taken the decision to partner with Seat 61 to offer a travel advice forum on Loco2, which we’re calling ‘The Engine Room’.

The Engine Room is a place where visitors to our website can ask questions about their travels, and get advice on how to get the best deal. We hope it will grow into a useful resource, with a community of travellers who provide tips to each other as well as get advice from Loco2’s experts. Getting on-site feedback from Engine Room users will also help us to prioritise improvements to our journey-planning/ booking tools, so that over time (and as new booking systems/datasets become available to us) we can ensure that we are delivering what customers want.

Open source rail frameworks

The biggest achievement for Loco2 over the past 18 months has been building a great technical team, and ensuring that our software development approach and system architecture are up to the task of robust rail booking. Unlike a lot of existing travel technology companies, we have decided to embrace open source frameworks instead of relying on Microsoft and other ‘closed’ technologies like asp.net. Our site is built in the aptly named web application framework, Ruby on Rails, and we’re proud to have one of its leading experts, Jon Leighton, as Loco2’s Technical Director.

Despite the significant technical challenges we’ve faced so far, we realise that one of the biggest challenges still lies ahead: the successful marketing of the rail products that we offer through our site.

In contrast to lots of online travel agents (OTAs), we are focused exclusively on rail, and there are definitely no plans to add flight booking to our site. Whilst this makes for a challenging business model in some respects (it’s much easier to get hold of flight data/APIs, and cheaper prices means that customers are more likely to book), we hope that it means rail operators and other ticket providers are more willing to work with us, because they know that we have only one commercial incentive – to sell more train tickets and help take the market share away from air travel.

Reviving train travel’s golden age

In our marketing, we want to emphasise the romanticism and relaxation of train travel and contrast it with the poor image of jam-packed budget flights with endless security checks, sterile airports and numerous hidden costs of flying, despite cheap up-front prices. Communicating this ‘slow travel’ message in a world dominated by social media and short attention spans is not easy, but we think that the travel experience speaks for itself. Enabling happy travellers to easily share photos, videos and maps of their journeys provides the social proof to other prospective customers that train travel is a great way to see Europe.

When the creative team brainstorms a great new feature that helps in marketing rail travel – such as interactive maps that can be shared on Facebook – and the technical team then implements it, it feels really exciting. We have a lot of ideas about how to promote train travel, and we can’t wait to integrate with as many booking systems as possible so that we can get people off planes and onto the fantastic European rail network.

About the author

Prior to co-founding Loco2, Jamie Andrews held several roles in clean energy technology commercialisation, carbon footprinting software develop – ment, and web development. Beginning his career at a clean energy technology incubator in Sheffield, Jamie went on to project manage the launch of thecarbonaccount.com for Torchbox, and then took a leading business development role at AMEE, where he helped clients develop sophisticated carbon footprint calculators using AMEE’s technical platform. A frustration at the lack of online resources for international train travel, and the desire to make sustainable travel more open to everyone, led Jamie and his sister Kate to found Loco2 in 2007.