Traveline appoints Passenger for next generation digital services

Passenger has been appointed to deliver the next generation of Traveline’s family of digital services, including its journey planning service, PlusBus website, and national public transport data repository website, Traveline Data. This project provides a new technology solution for data management, journey planning, and real-time information, helping deliver better public transport information for communities, businesses, and visitors UK-wide.

Traveline is a not-for-profit limited company owned and managed by public transport stakeholders across the public and private sectors. Its board members represent all major bus groups, independent bus operators, local authorities, customers, and the Rail Delivery Group. 

Serving up five million results to customers every month, Traveline offers multi-modal journey planning that includes every bus, coach, rail, ferry and light rail route in England, Scotland and Wales. It is considered the industry’s journey planner. Its development is a result of the active collaboration of all board members to create a high-quality offer for customers to support the increased use of public transport. 

The contract will deliver a new traveline.info website and app, making existing features easier to discover and adding new capabilities at almost every part of the customer journey through the site. These include bus fares, PlusBus information, real-time bus locations, accessibility information, service updates, and additional information such as vehicle branding, onboard WiFi, and USB charging availability.

The work also includes the redevelopment of the PlusBus website as part of Traveline’s broader Digital Transformation programme for PlusBus. The new website will be an essential customer touchpoint in supporting the rollout of Traveline’s new UK-wide PlusBus eTicket, helping to fulfil the ambition of the National Bus Strategy for England towards integrated ticketing. Following successful pilots in 2024, the PlusBus eTicket will enable travellers to buy a through-journey for local buses, rail and tram in one transaction on their mobile phone. The website will be instrumental in providing information to the large segment of consumers who prefer e-ticketing over paper and for whom PlusBus is not currently attractive.

Traveline Data will also undergo a revamp. The site hosts the Traveline National Dataset (TNDS), a key national open data for public transport, the NextBuses API and the National Operator Database. It also provides links to other public transport resources. 

Julie Gray, CEO at Traveline, comments, “We are a small operational team with excellent technical and project management knowledge and experience. We have close working relationships with all our suppliers, where problem solving and developing new solutions and ideas are often collaborative. Communication and collaboration are key to our success, and Passenger is well respected for its emphasis on this approach. We’re excited to get underway with the team, and to leverage its successful platform technology to deliver the next generation of Traveline for our stakeholders.” 

The project will bring Traveline’s web offerings into one family, with a common look and feel and customer experience across the sites, along with updated technical infrastructure and hosting.

Tom Quay, CEO at Passenger comments, “Traveline is an organisation we’ve admired for a long time. We’re delighted to be working with the team to realise further our shared visions for increased adoption of public transport. Traveline will benefit from a decade of specialist public transport software and customer experience expertise. The work will see Passenger move deeper into multi-modal transport information delivery, building on our deep expertise in bus. This announcement is exciting news for existing Passenger clients, too, as we will explore opportunities to amplify the work they are already doing on our platform by bringing their updates to more people through Traveline. We’re excited to get started!”