Masabi, MasterCard and Athens Deliver City-Wide
Multi-Mode Mobile Ticketing

Transport for Athens (TfA) is the transport authority of the greater area of Athens, Greece, responsible for planning and managing public transport services including subway, bus, tram and trolley. TfA moves around 1 million individual passengers daily, has annual fare revenues of approximately 250 million Euros. In late 2014 Masabi in partnership with MasterCard launched a city-wide, multi-mode mobile ticketing system across Athens.

In many cities, transit fare payments have historically been cash-based, with passengers having to go to a ticket office or machine to purchase a physical ticket. In Athens specifically, customers had to travel to their nearest Metro station to buy a ticket, even if they were travelling by bus. This closed approach hindered the freedom and flexibility usually associated with travel and restricted travel between transport types.

To introduce flexible travel Masabi, in partnership with MasterCard, and TfA deployed mobile ticketing in the city across all modes of public transport. The deployment, which soft launched as a pilot in late December 2014, represents the city’s first implementation of a digital ticketing system that supplements its co-existing paper ticket cash-based operation. Athens rolled-out Masabi’s end-to-end mobile ticketing system, JustRide, which has also been successfully deployed in other large cities including; Boston, London, San Diego and will be launching in New York.

Consequently Athens’ 1.0 million daily public transport customers are now able to purchase and display tickets for immediate and future travel through their smartphone, saving time and hassle. Meanwhile, Transport for Athens expects to reduce its costs for handling cash and paper ticket printing, enabling new investments into its infrastructure and services. The move from cash to card and ability for customers to purchase a ticket and travel at any time, from anywhere in the city has been a massive asset and is a step-change in accessibility for the transit system.

Transport for Athens (TfA) is using Masabi’s award-winning ticketing and payment service JustRide, a cloud-based, deployment-proven, end-to-end mobile ticketing and fare collection system. It comprises award-winning apps for ticket purchase, display and inspection together with back-end infrastructure for secure payments, ticket management, customer service, reporting and real-time analytics.

JustRide allows commuters to use their mobile phones to buy tickets for all urban transit services in Athens. The service makes purchasing tickets easier, faster and more convenient allowing customers to buy their tickets while at home, on the go or in the metro/ bus station, without needing to queue or scramble for change. As a result, Athens now has an innovative mobile ticketing platform across its entire urban transit network alongside its previous cash only system.

By expanding accessibility of purchase, from limited retail points to being able to purchase anywhere, on the mobile, customers will now find it much easier to pay their fare and so revenue is expected to grow. The cloud-hosted solution also offers significant benefit to TfA, allowing them reduce spending on costly ticket machines and ticket tokens, it also provides better user data allowing more efficient planning of transport resources.

During the initial soft-launch Masabi and MasterCard saw a record for a launch day of mobile ticketing and have seen 25% of users who downloaded the application go on to make a purchase using the service, demonstrating excellent user experience and accessibility.

“Mobile ticketing offers a win-win situation for Athens, combining an excellent user experience for passengers with the added benefit of reducing the costs associated with cash handling,” said Gregory Dimitriadis, Chairman of the BoD & CEO, Transport for Athens. “In deploying Masabi’s technology across all modes of public transport in Athens, we are launching one of the world’s largest mobile ticketing deployments seen to date. We are proud to be leading the world in offering this innovation across all modes of transport.”

Athens is the first example of Masabi’s recent cooperation with MasterCard to deliver and promote mobile ticketing and is a concept that they plan to repeat with other public transport operators globally.

With partnerships with some of the largest public transport agencies on the planet Masabi is already changing the way ordinary people buy public transport tickets in the UK, North America and Europe and through this, changing the way ordinary people adopt mobility in transport.