Creating momentum
New NFC (Near Field Communication) forecast from Juniper Research suggests that mobile ticketing industry is set to boom. Juniper expects half a billion will use mobile devices as travel tickets on metros, tubes and buses by 2015. Report also suggests that Western Europe and the Far East will be adopting mobile ticketing in a big way by 2015.
Forecasting over five times the number generated last year in the latest Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report, Juniper is now hoping usage to increase and spread outside Japan and reach several other European countries.
Mobile tickets have already been around for several years in large cities like Scandinavia, Stockholm, and Prague to name a few. Outside Japan, SMS or bar codes were predominantly used for mobile tickets so far. Juniper believes that the recent adoption of the NFC protocol will only add to the existing market growth.
According to author Howard Wilcox: "Whether by expansion of SMS and bar code delivery or by NFC, at Juniper we see convenience and choice for users as key advantages of mobile ticketing. It will be 2013 before large numbers of NFC enabled devices are in peoples' pockets and our new report forecasts the impact on transaction volumes."
Further, as NFC has the potential across domestic train travel and air travel, Juniper's latest report holds an elaborate five-year forecast for all the key market parameters starting from users, transactions and values for airline, rail and metro/bus ticketing. However, report also points out that poor user experience such as bar code issues might be one of the main risks in implementing the technology.
