Bern, 4 May 2023. End April, FAIRTIQ celebrated its seventh birthday and its 100 millionth journey recorded on its check-in app. This milestone demonstrates the impressive development of the Swiss company since its founding in 2016 – from the bold idea of a team that was ridiculed, to award-winning technology full of innovation, with loyal public transport partner companies in several European countries and a rapidly growing base of passengers. In the past twelve months alone, the total number of FAIRTIQ journeys has doubled.
When Gian-Mattia Schucan gave up his job as Sales and Service Manager at Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) to independently advise companies, some were surprised. When he founded a start-up a short time later to develop a completely new technology for ticketing in public transport, the FAIRTIQ approach was dismissed by many. However, Schucan was convinced that in the future, public transport would have to operate without paper tickets and without having to hunt for small change to buy tickets at machines or counters – above all, to appeal to customers. “We started in 2016, with the goal of making bus and rail travel and tariffs as simple and fair as possible,” he recalls. “And we are still pursuing this mission to this day.”
The initially small team now boasts over 140 employees. The founder recently split the CEO role with Anne Mellano as part of a growth-promoting joint leadership model. FAIRTIQ technology has received many awards and is the market leader in the field of smartphone-based check-in/check-out solutions – a swipe when boarding and another when exiting is all it takes to register a journey and automatically purchase a ticket. The fact that the system has proven itself 100 million times and in seven countries, and has been integrated as a technology in the SBB mobile app since 2019, is notably due to the companies that put so much faith in FAIRTIQ right from the start. The Transports Publics Fribourgeois (TPF) (Fribourg Public Transport), the Lucerne Transit Agency (VBL) and the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) were the first to use the app in 2016. “We were immediately impressed by FAIRTIQ’s innovative approach and are still happy about the constant further development of the app in the interests of the customer,” says Renato Fasciati, Director of the Rhaetian Railway (RhB).
In fact, constant optimisation and regular developments are core elements of the FAIRTIQ philosophy. In close cooperation with the public transport industry, new tariffs such as billing based on a direct route (as the crow flies), price caps based on daily, weekly or monthly tariffs as well as technical, advanced features such as the smart stop function for automatically ending the trip recording have all been developed over the years. They all help attract more passengers to buses and trains. Partner companies and public transport users benefit from the in-depth expertise of the FAIRTIQ development team, which uses AI technologies, among other things.
In the past year, this development culminated in record growth. The number of trips increased by 50 million to 100 million. Seven new regions introduced FAIRTIQ, including four transport associations in Germany, two large regions in France and the city of Geneva. In the new partner country France alone, more than 1.5 million FAIRTIQ journeys have been completed since April 2022. Large-scale pilot projects were launched in partnership with the transport operator BVG in Berlin, as well as in Belgium and Denmark. Long-term partnerships have been significantly developed in the past twelve months too. In total, for example, more than 3.5 million journeys were recorded in Germany last year.
FAIRTIQ works with over 60 public transport providers. They have recently been able to offer their customers another attractive feature: the additional passenger feature (Companion Mode) launched at the beginning of the year is proving very popular – and together with the opening up of new countries, it will lead to a further steep increase in the number of FAIRTIQ journeys.
May 04, 2023
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