Juniper Research's (News - Alert) latest report on “Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets” contains detailed five year forecasts for all the key market parameters that include users, transactions and values for airline, rail and metro/bus ticketing.
The Juniper Research report highlights the fact that by 2015, usage of mobile devices as travel tickets on all major forms of transport will increase tremendously. That more than half a billion people worldwide would resort to using their mobile devices for ticketing purposes spells an increase of more than 500 percent in comparison to 2010.
Most of the impact will be in Japan and in several European countries as countries outside Japan typically use SMS or barcodes. SMS ticketing has been in operation for several years in large cities in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe such as Stockholm and Prague.
Other findings suggest that in addition to Western Europe, the Far East and China will be the leading transport mobile ticketing regions by volume in 2015. Mobile ticketing across train and air travel appears to have a lot of potential.
According to Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report author Howard Wilcox: "Whether by expansion of SMS and bar code delivery or by NFC, at Juniper we see convenience and choice for users as key advantages of mobile ticketing. It will be 2013 before large numbers of NFC enabled devices are in peoples' pockets and our new report forecasts the impact on transaction volumes."
Near Field Communications is touted as being a factor that could accelerate the usage of mobile devices for ticketing purposes. With the opening of contactless payment systems, NFC ticket usage will witness significant growth from 2013.
The new report also highlights the conclusions from Juniper's analysis of 23 vendors addressing the market, which culminates in a new Transport Mobile Ticketing vendor strategy positioning matrix.
In other news, NFC-enabled smartphones, which initially launched in 2010, will constitute 28 percent of total smartphone sales to end users (250 million units) by 2015, according to a new report from Pyramid Research.
Mini Swamy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
