You clearly have a lot of experience in the area of rail travel pricing. What does ticketclever bring to the party that is not already available commercially?
ticketclever's achievement is to simplify the complicated business of finding cheap rail fares quickly, whether booking in advance or on the day of travel. With ticketclever, we've used custom-built algorithms to search billions of ticket combinations. This allows us to find more cheap train fares than any other independent online rail ticket provider.
ticketclever presents different ticket options for a particular journey, allowing customers to easily decide if they would like to take a slower journey to save money, or just buy the regular fare.
Our aim is simple; to make the whole process of finding the best fares more transparent. We have unlocked access to more cheap train fares and more journey options, all without a booking fee or credit or debit card fees.
How did the tech behind ticketclever develop and how long has it taken to bring it to market?
To perfect the algorithms required quite a bit of research and development with our dedicated and talented team of mathematicians and computer scientists from Oxford University.
Why now?
The price of train travel is under increasing media scrutiny so we decided it was time the British public had a transparent train travel-booking site where they can check what the real options are.
What commission do you charge and are you friend or foe as far as the railway operators are concerned?
We don't charge any commission to customers and our deal with train operators is that same as everyone else; we have a signed agreement from all the operators.
Do the prices reset daily, weekly, or per trip enquiry, bit like a Google search?
Rail ticket pricing is set by the government and the operators and can change over time. We take any new prices and apply them overnight to ticketclever.com. Our algorithm crunches the billions of these fare and route combinations every time a customer enters a search query so we can show a transparent set of prices which include the cheapest, quickest, and most flexible fares available for each journey.
Any plans to take the technology beyond our shores?
We'd love to, but we have a strong development pipeline in place for the UK to manage just now, but we'd be thrilled to introduce ticketclever into new markets in the future.
