Recent content by Mike@Raileasy

Well said! The Jacobs research commissioned by the IRR conservatively estimated that giving retailers access to ADS - an availability feed from RARS - could unlock £500 million in incremental annual revenue. That’s roughly a third of the current industry deficit. Discussions are underway but the...

Even for £500m in incremental revenue per annum?

RDG "looks after" RARS. As for why, I'm not sure really but something was said recently to one retailer that the amount of data being transferred would be costly to handle and only the big boys could afford to "host/use" ADS. There are plenty of small companies integrating Darwin which is...

We're trying to convince stakeholders and just wanted to tell our customers and social media followers how it could change things for the better, get some support :-)

The operational side for availability queries, inc the costs, would move to retailers or TIS suppliers with perhaps a final "sanity check" with RARS on what the customer wanted to book before proceeding through the booking flow. As above, cost of implementing it will be borne by IRR members. No...

Indeed, and as someone, who did a load of number crunching about the data requirements, said about its feasibility, for £500m anything should (technically) feasible. 1748337535 Independent Rail Retailers

ADS will hopefully be a real time feed from RARS updating changes to availability - hence it stands for "availability" distribution service. So retailers' and TOCs' websites/apps will query their own local availability caches populated by that rather than RARS. That will enable calendar views...

Please just do what you can. You'll still be heard :-)

I think you've got to admit though we have a pretty good "go" at what you suggest, far more so than other journey planners used by retailers. But currently there are limits imposed on us and that is the point about ADS, and why we're "campaigning" so hard to get it, the shackles will be off :-)...

We want to quantify how flexible people can be with their rail travel.

Thanks for being a "fan" :-) This research is to help us get ADS, an availability feed from RARS. With that, rather than being limited by what we are permitted to query with RARS, we'll have our own real time, totally up to date "cache" so we will undoubtedly find more/better prices over a much...

So for instance we could mail our database saying "Here are Christmas markets you can visit from your local station for £15 or £30 next weekend". This sort of "push marketing" is another business case for ADS.

So for instance a month's view of availability would suit you? Precisely the kind of thing ADS will enable inc accurate data.

Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of our data has always been the primary objective. We are confident that the survey is well structured to avoid unreliable, biased feedback and inaccurate results. I'm sure the team will be very aware of the points you make as they analyze the data to ensure...

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey. The survey was "coded" by Verian, a market research company, and designed by Jacobs who have historically done extensive franchise work for TOCs and the DfT, including demand forecasting. Our goal is to estimate potential revenue growth if we and...