Airline market rebound spurs growth in mobile tickets as 1 in 7 boarding passes to be mobile by 2013, says research

One in every seven bar coded boarding passes worldwide will be delivered to passengers’ mobile devices within 2 years, according to the latest forecasts from Juniper Research. This equates to 480 million mobile boarding passes which is treble the 160 million for last year, as mobile technology and especially smartphones are having a rapidly growing impact on the airline industry.

Following the recently improved industry outlook for airline passenger volumes, a new report from Juniper Research has identified significant market progress for mobile tickets from both vendors and crucially airlines.  Juniper says it has detected a marked upswing in corporate activity over the past year amongst vendors addressing this market. 

According to report author Howard Wilcox: “Of the 30 airlines including several flag carriers that we found offering mobile boarding passes, about half also offer mobile ticket booking and purchasing. For the frequent flyer, we believe that using your mobile for booking, passing through security and boarding is a winning offer that will be augmented by adding loyalty, seat selection and flight information all in the single application.”

Furthermore, Juniper’s new Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report also found that mobile ticketing also has growing potential across train travel and in suburban metro systems, which will be boosted by the momentum currently being seen in NFC.

Juniper’s new report contains detailed five year forecasting for all the key market parameters including users, transactions and values for airline, rail and metro/bus ticketing. Additionally the report highlights the conclusions from Juniper’s analysis of 23 vendors addressing the market, which culminates in a new Transport Mobile Ticketing vendor strategy positioning matrix.

Further key findings from the report include:

•        More than one in ten subscribers will use mobile tickets for air, rail or metro travel worldwide by 2015.

•        Poor user experience is an implementation risk – such as bar code reading issues.