Heritage Railway innovates ticketing offering

Heritage Railway innovates ticketing offering

Heritage Railway improves product offering and customer experience using sophisticated seating plans and capacity management.

Using the web-based Expian admin interface, members of the Historic Railway teams can manage all the requirements of a railway line including intricate seating plans with numbered seats.

Offering a wide variety of add-ons surfaced as part of the booking user journeys offered online and on site. Those include selling parking with limited capacity to F&B offerings and upsells, for example, upgrade to a first class ticket.

The Heritage Railway operate shops where they sell souvenirs and F&B where customers can also purchase tickets. Following an integration with the existing tills, their staff sell tickets using real-time availability on the retail tills and tickets alongside F&B and shop items which can be sold together in one transaction. Moreover, staff on the ground can use the handheld ticketing POS device for selling and scanning tickets.

Intricate seating plans are easily set-up, consisting of multiple carriages with different compartments and variable pricing per section per route per season. Upon purchasing tickets, customers are offered numbered seats so that they won’t need to rush to take a seat but instead they will be able to spend more time at the cafes and the shops.

Many historic railways depend on donations to help preserve the history and heritage of the railway lines.  The donation and gift-aid feature enables customers to include a suggested donation as part of their booking journey as opposed to completing a separate transaction.  This has had a dramatic impact on the amount of donations received.

The team also manage ticketing for a second attractions, a riverboat sightseeing experience with both attractions managed from within the same interface. Even though one operates multi-stop routes for which they sell tickets for specific date and time during busy months with variable pricing per route segment and date tickets for the off peak months. The other has different prices, for different compartments and various event experiences to choose from.

Features used
  • Full Customer Service at all touch points using portable handheld devices
  • Capacity Management
  • Journey Scheduling
  • Donations
  • Gift-Aid
  • Trade B2B booking portal
  • Customer booking portal
  • Membership booking portal
  • Group / Educational Bookings
  • Reporting & Yield Management
  • Sales capping
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