Commuters can now use the urban transit network of Athens, Greece, with nothing more than a smartphone making the search for tickets and passes a thing of the past! With Masabi and MasterCard, commuters will be able to travel with nothing more than a smartphone. The city’s bus, tram and metro lines have moved to Masabi’s JustRide mobile ticketing system with MasterCard handling the payments.
Greeks and tourists alike can download the JustRide mobile app for Athens to buy tickets and passes for the entire transit system on their smartphones. Those tickets are then displayed on their screens to show to fare inspectors along with a QR code that can be scanned at automated stations.
Meanwhile, Transport for Athens expects to reduce its costs for handling cash and paper ticket printing, enabling new investments into its infrastructure and services.
Masabi’s JustRide is a cloud-based, deployment-proven, end-to-end mobile ticketing and fare collection system. It comprises award-winning apps for ticket purchase, display and inspection together with back-end infrastructure for secure payments, ticket management, customer service, reporting and real-time analytics. In a separate announcement today, Masabi revealed that it is partnering with MasterCard to deliver and promote the mobile ticketing concept to public transport operators globally.
“Mobile ticketing offers a win-win situation for Athens, combining an excellent user experience for passengers with the added benefit of reducing the costs associated with cash handling,” said Gregory Dimitriadis, Chairman of the BoD & CEO, Transport for Athens. “In deploying Masabi’s technology across all modes of public transport in Athens, we are launching one of the world’s largest mobile ticketing deployments seen to date. We are proud to be leading the world in offering this innovation across all modes of transport.”
“The smartphone has given us the opportunity to offer the most significant innovation in transport fare collection. Mobile ticketing not only provides customers with a user-friendly way to pay for travel but will also aid growth by adding significant sales capacity without the need to invest in costly infrastructure,” said Brian Zanghi, CEO, Masabi. “We have already made JustRide a success in major global cities with high passenger volumes such as London and Boston, with New York soon to follow suit. We look forward to working with Athens to facilitate the first deployment of its kind in mainland Europe.”
