East Yorkshire pushes the customer experience with new travel alerts

Today, we’re delighted to share that Go-Ahead’s East Yorkshire Buses has gone live with Passenger’s personalised travel alerts capability across its network in Hull, East Yorkshire and the North.

The East Yorkshire Buses app from Passenger was launched over eight years ago and has been a key part of the bus operator’s customer experience ever since. With consistently high customer ratings in the app stores, the new capabilities continue a long programme of app enhancements for customers in the region, ensuring that information about the services they use day in and day out is readily available.

The powerful new capability is designed to keep customers informed about the changes that matter most to them. The new feature, available on iOS and Android, uses existing data to deliver real-time notifications about planned and unplanned changes on the network in a targeted, relevant, and frictionless way for operators and customers.

Personalised travel alerts allow customers to receive app push notifications directly related to their travel preferences, using their favourite services and stops to determine relevancy. This personalised approach ensures that communications help customers stay informed without feeling overwhelmed by unnecessary updates — a step change in how this information is traditionally shared, replacing the need to broadcast on social media channels.

Stuart Fillingham, Commercial Director at East Yorkshire, comments, “It has been a great experience to work on the capability with Passenger at the design stage and now to be able to roll this out with our customers at East Yorkshire. The alerts will make it easier for customers to stay informed about changes on the network and help us share updates as quickly as possible.”

First launched to Passenger app platform customers in October 2024 as part of Passenger’s Enterprise Inform capability pack, this feature has quickly become a valuable tool for riders across a growing number of operators. In its first six months, our technology had sent over 3.2 million highly targeted notifications to riders about the disruptions that matter to them.

Now with 27 active deployments, the adoption of personalised alerts is also enabling operators to move away from traditional social media updates for service disruptions. Several, including East Yorkshire’s sister company, Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight, have since stopped posting updates to social channels such as X and Facebook when sharing this type of information.

For a long time, social media has been a low-cost way for operators to communicate last-minute changes to their services. Posting updates to followers has been the easiest way for operators to get information out to their customers en masse. This type of proactive broadcast significantly reduced the calls and emails their customer service teams need to handle when something unexpected happens on the network. But for all the good, the approach isn’t without its problems.

As most operators know, their feed quickly becomes a firehose of bad news, filled with updates about cancelled journeys, vehicle issues, diversions, stop closures — the list goes on. Whilst comparatively low in the context of the many millions of daily bus journeys, this feed can make it look like everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. The unintended consequence is a perception of public transport’s unreliability, which is off-putting for existing and future customers.

Any positive content is quickly and routinely drowned out by what is happening in the real world, often only impacting a few customers. But in full view of everyone.

Passenger’s Personalised Travel Alerts are the perfect antidote.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our technology can enhance the rider experience for your organisation, drop us a line. We’ll be happy to help.