Rail passengers have made more than 150,000 journeys using the Transport for Wales Pay As You Go ticketing system supported by Unicard technology in the three months since launch – making it TfW’s fastest-growing ticketing product.
TfW was the first train operator outside of London and the south-east of England to launch the contactless EMV (cEMV) payment system last year.
They introduced the tap in, tap out technology at 95 railway stations throughout South Wales in November 2024. It provides their customers with automatic daily and weekly capping, offering significant savings compared with standard anytime singles and 7-day season tickets.
TfW use Unicard’s Ticketing Hub to enable cEMV services, which means travellers do not have to pre-purchase a paper or digital ticket for their journey. Instead, they can use a payment card or mobile device to tap in and out on ticket barriers at the start and end of every train journey.
Ticketing Hub receives and processes these taps, and the price of each trip is calculated based on each customer’s travel patterns and behaviour. Unicard then ensure that an accurate and secure payment is made based on their overall journey.
Importantly, unlike other cEMV solutions, Ticketing Hub is agnostic to the card reader used, so scheme administrators can mix equipment within a single deployment. The Unicard solution is also multi-modal and multi-operator, creating a future-proofed ticketing environment for developing more-integrated transport networks.
Alexia Course, Chief Commercial Officer at TfW, said: “We want to offer customers the fastest, easiest and cheapest ticket offer – and tap on, tap off ticketing allows us to do this.
“We are proud to be one of the first train operators outside of London to be using this technology at 95 of our stations across South Wales. This was one of our huge promises around the South Wales Metro, and it’s now been delivered and has become our fastest-selling product.”