The start of online retailing is generally credited to Virgin, with its commitment to online retailing in the original Virgin Trains franchises that commenced back in 1997. (Albeit, in the later years of its existence, British Rail was already exploring a move into online ticket sales).
thetrainline.com
It took Virgin two years to bring online retail to market, at a reported investment of £35m, launching as thetrainline.com in February 1999.
(At the time it was apparently only the second Virgin company not to carry the Virgin brand, apparently to avoid the perception that it only sold tickets for Virgin Trains).
It is worth a moment to reflect on the market context at that time:
- Railway privatisation had recently completed, with 25 Train Operating Companies (TOCs) running trains, and Railtrack running tracks and signalling. The new Labour government had been elected less than two years previously. It was warning the TOCs that they were on trial, and that performance and customer service had to improve. The Strategic Rail Authority was in the process of being established to provide strategic oversight to the industry and hold TOCs to account.
- The “dot.com boom” was well underway, and unbeknown at the time, was just a year away from its peak. Lastminute.com had launched a year previously, and had quickly become the posterchild of the new online era.
- The number of households with internet access more than doubled during 1999, driven by the arrival of Freeserve’s ‘no subscription’ model, but nonetheless only 20% of households had internet access by the end of the year (nearly all dial-up, broadband was only just starting to be piloted).
- As a forerunner to the later Apple vs Android wars, the internet had “browser wars” between Internet Explorer and Netscape. The lack of standards, and lack of adherence to the standards that did exist, often required two versions of code, and many permutations of testing for the numerous versions in use.
- For information about train times and fares the National Rail Enquiries Service handled 60m phone calls per annum. For disruption information people turned to Ceefax. Staff got their updates via thousands of pagers. Railtrack provided an online journey planner for train times, which was said to be the second most popular travel website in the UK, attracting 500,000 visitors a week at its peak (albeit it did not show fares nor real-time information).
- 78% of tickets were purchased at ticket offices; 14% on board; and 4% via telephone.
Although predominantly presented as an online business, thetrainline.com was a multi-channel proposition also covering telesales. A 1,000 agent contact centre operation across multiple sites in Scotland, which for many years sold more tickets than the online channel. The technology platform had two user interfaces: an advanced one for contact centre agents, and a simplified and more colourful one for the general public. thetrainline.com team itself was small, with the technology and contact centres outsourced to Capgemini, who in turn subcontracted Vertex for contact centre, Shere for ticket printing and Carmen Systems for journey planning.
“The system involves registration and allows you to search for the fastest or cheapest fares and routes. You can choose smoking or non-smoking and even which direction your seat should face.”
Figure 1: The BBC news website announces the launch of www.thetrainline.com See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/285300.stm
(NB: Trainline’s branding has evolved over the years from www.thetrainline.com, thetrainline.com, thetrainline, and more recently Trainline. I’ve tried to reflect the brand as used at the time referred to when writing this)
"Cut price-rail chaos"
It has been customary to have a "rail sale" in the new year, to try to stimulate demand at an otherwise quiet time of the year. February 2001 saw Virgin Trains launch their "world's biggest rail offer" - halving all fares across their network. This was a major test for the two-year-old thetrainline.com - resulting a 600% increase in demand overnight, whilst its call-centres received a record 376,000 calls in one day. Many customers were greeted with a "site busy" message, whilst reportedly Sir Richard Branson had to call the CEO of BT to plead for more internet bandwidth which would have normally taken 3 months to provision.
Others enter the market
Whilst thetrainline.com was first out of the blocks, two competitors were hot on its heels: totaljourney and Qjump. totaljourney was a joint venture between Railtrack and First Group (who operated three franchises). Qjump was established by National Express Group (who operated nine franchises).
Each was fundamentally performing the same function, but with a different emphasis.
totaljourney launched two years after thetrainline.com in June 2001 and set its ambitions on offering rail, flights, hotel and car hire, along with ancillary services such as town and city guides. Its £18m launch budget was about half of what Virgin stated they had invested in launching thetrainline.com. It was built by Equant upon SITA’s ecommerce platform, using Fujitsu’s (then ICL) journey planning and fares engine.
Qjump meanwhile started with a focus on providing online ticketing to the National Express Group franchises in their own brands. Indeed, the Midland Mainline website was the first to launch in 2001 - the Qjump branded site itself did not launch until 2002. With the slimmest budget of the three players, it leveraged its relationships with National Express train companies to supplement its marketing. Built by BT Syntegra, it used the same Fujitsu journey planning and fares engine as totaljourney, and the same Shere ticket printing system as thetrainline.com.
Whilst 2001 was an exciting year for online retail, the wider railway picture was a grimmer one. The Great Heck crash in February occurred only months after the Hatfield accident the previous October. The network was crippled by speed restrictions as the extent of track maintenance issues became apparent. In October Railtrack PLC was placed into Railway Administration, and the inability of Railtrack Group to continue to support totaljourney led to its premature closure in December 2021, less than 6 months after it launched. The brand vanished, and the team disbanded, but the technology platform would later be acquired by Eurostar to allow Eurostar customers to book through domestic journeys.
This set the scene for a two-year, two player “David and Goliath” battle between thetrainline.com and Qjump (albeit in this case, even Goliath wasn’t that big!).
