Trainline has competitive strengths and structural tailwinds that position the business for significant long-term growth.
Competitive strengths
We enable millions of travellers to seamlessly search, book and manage their journeys through our highly rated Trainline website, mobile app and B2B partner channels.
- 4.9/5 star rated app
- 55 million cumulative Trainline mobile app downloads
- c.32 million MAUs across the UK and Europe
- c.117 million platform visits each month
Our innovation focuses on creating a simple, consistent, friction-free experience for booking and managing travel. We bring together all carriers into one app while providing smart, real-time travel information and self-serve capabilities like journey changes and refunds.
- Simple, intuitive user interface with all carriers, fares and railcards in one place
- Seamless, friction-free booking experience
- Digital tickets and railcards, smart personalisation, real time travel info
- Money-saving features: SplitSave, Price Prediction, Ticket Alerts, Best Fare Finder, Railcard Finder
- Self-service change of journey, automated refund capability
We have developed a highly scalable, marketing playbook in the UK, which we are deploying across our core markets in Europe. This helps drive customer acquisition at scale while maintaining a low cost per new customer acquired (“CPA”)
- >80% new customer acquisition through free channels in the UK (e.g. SEO)
- Sophisticated CRM strategies to drive engagement and frequency
- Shifting customers to mobile app: 87% app share of transactions in the UK
As a platform business, we offer our innovative retailing experience directly to customers through our Trainline-branded businesses, while also giving carrier partners and other travel businesses access to our retail solutions to offer to their customers.
- 270+ rail and coach companies with deep integrations across 40 countries
- c500 engineers, data and tech specialists
- End-to-end digital retailing and ticketing solutions for rail carriers at a lower cost to serve
- Provides travel sellers access to our rail content through one connection - our global API
At Trainline, we recognise the importance of building and sustaining a strong, experienced management team. Click on the link below for more information about our management team.
Tailwinds for growth
Rail market shifting to online and mobile ticketing
- Customers are increasingly booking tickets online, now c.53% of all ticket sales in UK
- This has largely been driven by an increasing use of barcode read digital tickets (or etickets), doubling in last two years to >43% of ticket sales
- Trainline has championed etickets for several years as a core part of our mobile app proposition
- Significant headroom for further growth - eticket-enabled journeys expected to surpass 90% of all journeys in the UK by 2023
European domestic rail markets liberalising at pace, creating need for an aggregator
- The EU’s Fourth Railway Package (December 2020) opened domestic rail markets to competition
- As a result, carrier competition is emerging across France, Spain, and Italy, with the major carriers there entering each other’s markets, e.g.
- SNCF’s Ouigo brand entered the Spanish market in May 2021
- Renfe launched its low cost brand Avlo in response to this
- Trenitalia’s Iryo band (JV) launched its first services on the Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Valencia routes at the end of 2022
- Iryo is expanding routes in Spain, with services between Madrid-Seville/Malaga from March 2023 and Madrid-Alicante in June 2023
- Ouigo is planning to run on the Madrid-Seville/Malaga route by 2024
- Renfe is due to run cross-border services between Barcelona-Lyon and Madrid-Barcelona-Marseille by the summer of 2023
- Trainline positioning itself as the rail retailer in these core European markets, aggregating all the carriers, fares, and journey options in one place
- This helps customers navigate the increased complexity to find the right ticket, while bringing incremental customer demand to new entrant carriers
Governments investing to shift people on to trains as a greener mode of transport
- Trainline’s purpose is to empower greener travel choices, encouraging people to switch to rail from car and air travel
- Rail generates 86% less CO2 emissions than air travel and 70% less CO2 emissions compared with car travel, per passenger
- UK and European governments continue to encourage a modal shift to rail, and increasing their investment to meet net-zero emissions goals:
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The EU is targeting a 55% reduction target for CO2 emissions by 2030, and the UK has a reduction target of at least 78% by 2035 and a legally binding target to reach net zero by 2050
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The EU Commission has highlighted rail as playing a key role in the EU becoming climate-neutral by 2050. It targets the doubling of high-speed rail traffic by 2030 and a tripling of high-speed rail by 2050.
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