Trainline plc (TRN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our investor webinar. I'm Shaun McCabe, CFO of Trainline. I'm joined by Dave Price, our Chief Product Officer; and Steve Gooder, our Director of Product. But before I hand over to them, let me remind you about our core purpose for Trainline. To empower greener travel choices. Our vision is to build the world's leading rail platform, making it seamless for customers to find the right ticket at the right price online and delivering the experience either through our Trainline branded channels or through our travel partners. In doing so, we're making rail travel more attractive, encouraging millions of people to take trains rather than driving offline and making them proud to say I came by train. To achieve our vision, we have 4 strategic priorities for growth. Today's webinar will focus primarily on the first of these priorities, enhancing the customer experience. Product innovation is absolutely front and central to building a great customer experience. Leveraging our single global platform, Platform One, we provide customers with a one-stop shop for rail travel, significantly simplifying its complexity and scale. The secret sauce is the customer experience that's simple and intuitive. We continually improve and optimize this experience removing friction for customers while offering them access to real value and the widest choice of options. We invest in products and features that enhance the customer journey at every stage, from planning and booking right through to refunds and post sale. And we will increasingly use our data smarts and customer insights deliver intelligent travel for our customers. So with that, let me hand over to Dave and to Steve, who are going to bring all this to life for you.

Thanks, Shaun. Hello, everyone. Very delighted to be here today with Steve alongside me. Today, we're going to give you an intro into the Trainline product. And we are going to spotlight 3 areas, in particular, where our product sets itself apart from everybody in the industry. You're going to hear today about 3 things. First off, you're going to hear the words, Rail is complex a lot. And really seriously complex. We're going to talk to you a little bit about how in Platform One, we've built the foundations to enable us to handle the complexity of this scale. Number two, we're going to tell you about how the foundation and upon these foundation we've built the most seamless, the most differentiated experience for our customers. And we're not happy with just our experiences today despite it being a 4.9 star rated app. we are obsessive about solving customer problems. So you are going to hear about how we just keep on pushing this further and further. And third we are going to reveal some features which are coming in the future. Those are features which are only possible because of Trainline scale and because of the intelligence that we built from operating in this industry for so long and mastering all the complexity. Now Trainline has been in operation for about 20 years. Our teams Steve, Shaun everybody, we live and we breathe rail, which is a pretty good thing. I mentioned there was a lot of complexity and the underlying systems that are necessary for us to be able to handle just millions and millions of customers, huge amounts of transactions, it's huge. Many companies faced they tried, they've entered the market and then they subsequently pulled out. And the reason for that, it is because it's very difficult. Whether you look at Gare du Nord, which is the busiest station in Europe or you look at, it's a station in the U.K. with a very smallest platform. There are 45,000 stations, each an origin or a destination for somebody who's traveling on Trainline. Now there are 400 airports by comparison. There's 100 times more airports than there are -- railway stations than there are airports. And with that, comes incredible complexity. We have over 1.8 billion permutations and route combinations. Now if that wasn't enough with big numbers like that, on top of that, we have to contend with over 350,000 different versions of fares all of it, we have to stay on top off, because they constantly evolve. And we stay on top of it, because we've invested in the leading independent platform in the rail space, that's our global platform, Platform One, as Shaun just described. Now Platform One serves -- it serves both our trainline.com and our award-winning apps, but it also through Trainline Partner Solutions that it serves our carrier customers, our distribution partners as well. And I cannot overstate the complexity and the sophistication that had to go into that platform in order for it to handle 270 connections. These connections they are just not static. APIs change, time tables change, availability changes, we've got a constant feed of real-time movements that come for trains and disruptions. And all of that, our teams we have to process in milliseconds to ensure that more than 30 million monthly active users. 30 million monthly active users are able to book and able to travel Trainline. Now with that scale, we see upwards of 296 searches every single second. As a product guy, I am just crave data, a lot of data. And we've got 4 terabytes of data that come into our system every single day. That's 4 terabytes of data that are pure transactional data. So yes, there is no streaming. There's no content here at all. It is just pure transactional data. And the great thing is we are a data led company, which is building upon that intelligence, enabling us to create experiences that nobody else can do. We have an absolute treasure trove of insights and intelligence. Behind the scenes, we also have an incredible team. We've got the knowledge online rail team focused on building this platform and supporting this platform. Over 500 obsessed engineers, who have just got hundreds of years of EU rail expertise. And it's needed because we've got to be close to our customers. We've got to ensure that any time a new integration needs to go live, such as Trenitalia on the Paris to Lyon that we recently went live. But we are there at the moment that goes live. We need to ensure that we're continuously deploying every single change to stay on top of 350,000 fares that are always changing. And last but not least, with 1.8 billion routes, you've got this incredible complexity of real-time feeds coming in that we need to stay on top of to ensure our customers are aware of delays, disruptions just seconds after they occur. And our teams are primed to do that. It's not a standard 24/7, 365 job. So this is not a space that anybody can enter easily. They can't enter it quickly, and they certainly can't enter it cheaply. We have invested in the Platform One and foundations, that are so robust that enables us now to think about how do we move forward. And we've been moving forward with customer experiences that really set themselves apart. And I'm going to hand it off to Steve now, who's going to bring across one of those -- 1 or 2 of those examples to life.

Okay. Thanks, Dave. So -- it's a lot of work there to master all that complexity and to build the world's leading rail platform. So what is it for? Why are we doing it? Well, we're doing it to create a differentiated user experience that our customers love. And I'm going to talk a bit about how we do that. And first up, listening to our customers is a critical component. We've got a go superb team in the U.K. and beyond, and they talk to our customers. They look at the surveys and the results that we're getting in from post-travel and post-purchase satisfaction, and dozens of different customer input methods. And it's those inputs and the insights we derive from that, that drive everything we do, okay? So I'm going to pull a few examples of that together in a video that I will share with you see what our customers say that we talk to. [Presentation]

Okay. So right, there are some core themes there that you would have heard around choice and ease, speed and value, and also some product features like SplitSave, which we're going to come on to. And you have also heard lot of happy customers, and they're not alone. Happy customers tell other customers. They come back and they stay with us longer. And over the course of last year, the happy customers have helped us deliver some phenomenal results as Trainline's investment in products is driving growth and greater retention. So across the U.K., France and Italy, we have seen now 40% more customers are transacting with us twice a month or more. And that's up a third versus pre-COVID. And in international, we're acquiring more new app customers than ever before, 35% growth in international new app customers. And these new customers are better than ever. So we see 2x the repeat purchase rate for new app customers versus web in these core European markets. So this growth in app customers and a fantastic repeat purchase rate, but there's other reasons that we really believe in app. So rail is an inherently mobile experience. App is better for on-the-day purchases, it's better to supporting the customer through their journey on the day. So you can start to see why we're so focused about the app. And in the U.K. now, we are an app-based business. And we see 84% of our transactions are now on the app. It's up from 54% a few years ago. And we see the same kind of growth in international and a huge opportunity to replicate what we've seen in the U.K. and the EU to driving further growth there. Okay. So why are we getting these results? Well, Trainline's Platform One unlocks a world-class differentiated user experience. I suppose 30 million-plus monthly active users. It's an app store rating of 4.9 stars, and that's across 174,000 ratings. So a very solid base, not easily shifted and also way above what we're seeing from incumbent operators. And coupled with that, we've got a very high level of trust, a much wider -- much higher trust score that we see from the rest of the industry. And we're super proud about this. We're not complacent about it, as we relentlessly focus on moving these numbers even further up. So we've got the differentiated user experience. We listen to our customers. We're seeing the superb growth this retention, the app-based business that we become and our customers loving that. But what is it that is driving -- what is it behind this differentiated user experience that's driving the growth and the retention and this trust and the customer love. Well, we -- because our scale can experiment and validate faster than anyone, I'm going to be kind of curtain, as my colleague, Dave might say, to show 5 examples of this. We're going to show localizing at scale, how we aggregate all the options, and we deliver value through SplitSave and we're unlocking the New Commuter segment and help driving greener travel habits. Okay. So when you look at the Trainline app it's like you're looking at 1 app, right? But it's not quite the case, because behind the scenes, we're localizing at scale. And we have this apparent one simple flow that search, results, payment and tickets, and 80% of that is the same for every customer. But we're running an extensive program of experiments in each market, language, carrier and use case to optimize the different customer needs. So some of those examples, so something like language localization. So this is really starting with the basics. We're in 16 languages, and our station picker is obviously going to preference the relevant country based on your previous behavior, in your geo location and more. And we also match international names. So a U.K. customer searching for Rome, Roma, an Italian customer searching for Londra or London, okay? That really is just the basics. Localization is much more of the language. It's about local behavior and in order to understand that local behavior, we need deep local market knowledge. In France, for instance we see a longer booking horizon. So we form hypotheses about the optimal user experience in each market, and then we experiment with it. And so in France, seeing this longer booking horizon, we experimented with the calendar on the left versus the date picker on the right. And we found that in the French market, in particular, the delivered better step conversion. And then it goes beyond that. So we're obsessive about trying other things, we tested months, we tested for dates, we test different colors. It's an endless list, there's endless list of things that we can do to refine the flow and to remove friction for our customers. Another example of deep local market knowledge we required is when we look at the behavior of customers and how they search. So we have excellent teams in London, Milan, Paris, Barcelona, and in Italy, in particular, we learned that while most customers search through the typical kind of origin and destination pair, like Rome to Milan, Italians actually know which are the most reliable trains, and they want those particular trains. So in Italy, we find customers searching by train number, in this case, the 9630. And so we allow for them to search by train number. We make that train number more prominent throughout and then we test the results. We seem to see what that impact is through A/B testing, multivariate testing, we know that it delivers higher conversion, better retention and in the end higher net ticket sales through this local margin adaptation. Dave spoke earlier about the complexity of fares, 350,000 fares and each carrier has different flexibility, types and classes and refund rules and more. And so we have to simplify that. We've got some examples on the screen of how we do that. On the left, you'll see the different comfort levels and Freccia lounges and first class offering in Italy. And on the right, you'll see in the U.K., we've got split ticket, let's talk about shortly and the number of tickets left because the U.K. has tiered advanced pricing system that encourages early bookings. So we want to show how many are left at different price budgets. So all of those 350,000 fare combinations are mapped to an intuitive set of options that deliver value to our customers and demystify the rail complexity. And then with seat maps, as we roll them out, we have shred away again, all the complexity. The configuration and the available preferences and the cost of extras and accessibility choices that each carrier has are slightly different. And customers, they just want the seat that they want, they don't need to know about this back end complexity. They don't care about it. So we build it once, and we've rolled it out widely. And with Platform One this upfront investment pays off again and again as we roll out the feature like seat maps in different markets. Okay. So that is like 5 examples from the 300s, where we leverage the platform, we apply our local expertise, we use research, talk to customers, we experiment, and we localize the scale. And the aim of all of it is just to maintain simplicity regardless of the underlying complexity, and we're exceptionally good at it. And it drives growth and retention and creates barriers for our competitors. You will remember that our customers value choice. So how do we create choice? Well, one of the ways to do that is that we aggregate all the options available and where choice exists, Trainline excels. We now have carrier competition on the 6 of the top 10 routes in Europe, most recently, Paris to Lyon and Madrid to Barcelona. And this is great for customer acquisition. So 1 in 4 Trainline's new customers in Spain acquired on that Madrid to Barcelona route. And we see 2x growth in Trainline tickets sold since Trenitalia service launched Paris to Lyon. And it's not just the product and engineering and supply that count, we use all the angles, all the levers. A great example of this, you can see on screen is our fantastic marketing in Paris, Gare de Lyon station. So with aggregation, we have all the carriers, all the fares, all the journey options all in one place. And what's happening behind the scenes we're merging results in real time from up to 9 different carriers. And we're calculating the optimal journeys and fares, using increasingly sophisticated data science to aggregate journeys in this way. We're doing it millions of times a day. Aggregation is a real strength for us, but on the left you can see all services in 1 app. But on the right you see, we go further than this. And when we have new carriers entering the route, it multiplies, has multiplying effects on the journeys we can offer. So we can print this offer one carrier on the outbound and a different carrier on the return journey. On the right, we've got us combining Trenitalia and SNCF into one journey to create completely new options. So these are packages that you can't buy from either Trenitalia or SNCF, it's fantastic, and it creates unique value and choice for our customers. And beyond that, price is not the only differentiator. So you'll find different offerings across different carriers like some offer free refreshments in first class, some will have acquired coach options. And we're making that increasingly clear already on where to search and soon in the search results on the app as well to make customers able to understand their choices between different carriers. Right, so we don't need choice to offer value. So let's say there's an example where we actually create value. And value is our #1 customer need, it just beats everything. So I'll show the basics of how SplitSave works. So at any time single London to Manchester, leaving right now 3:20 today is GBP 184.70. But you can buy the exact same journey broken up into 2 tickets. So no getting off the train, no changing, just get 2 tickets instead of 1. And you can combine London to Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes to Manchester GBP 15.40 and GBP 53.60, respectively, and that adds up to GBP 69. So that is a saving of GBP 115.70. It's absolutely amazing, we're 2/3 off effectively. And it's incredible. I mean, our customers love this, and we make it super simple. Don't need to know how any of this works, you just buy. And it's incredibly popular, as you'd expect. It's an innovation that unlocks savings for the mass market. So since we've launched SplitSave, we've increased availability to 64% at launch, now 76% and 43% of our customers have bought a SplitSave ticket. And we're doing it with unrivaled response time. So nobody is doing split ticketing at our scale. So behind the scenes, it's incredibly sophisticated computer science and caching going on to avoid overloading industry systems. And like an example of that at scale at peak times we're returning 22,000 SplitSave journeys per minute. And we do all of that with 95 percentile response time in 79 milliseconds. So a lot of numbers there. It basically means it has no effect on the customer experience upon delivering fantastic value. Nobody else works in this way. Huge value on unmatched scale and we're investing to make it even better. Now split works for leisure and long distance. Dave is going to talk about how we're unlocking for those segments.

Thanks, Steve. So everybody there, they've got a real-time view of Steve doing a math lesson on SplitSave there, thanks for that. We are going to turn attention now to a segment which has seen a huge, huge change. Everybody is aware that the world of work has totally shifted and Trainline is putting themselves right at the heart of trying to meet those commuters new needs. But first of all, I'm going to rewind everybody on this call to something which I'm sure is pretty familiar to them. Now I'm sure you can all recall being in the station with queues like this where people queuing for tickets, paper tickets from a machine or to speak to somebody with pretty imperfect travel information. Well, you did that, and then you've got a paper ticket. And at the end of that, you've got the paper ticket, which often didn't scan through a ticket machine or through a barrier. Pretty often, you left in your back pocket, went through the washing cycle where still, small secret, the paper tickets are not recyclable. There is nothing at all redeeming about paper ticket. Now the good news is the Trainline partnered with the industry. We partnered with the industry in order to launch e-tickets. And over the last 2 years, e-tickets have literally taken off, fueled by both the pandemic and the behavior of pandemic, but also fueled by developments in our app. And kind of also as well just because customers really love it. It works. It's easy. So we now have 42% of all of the industry sales going through e-tickets. That's a figure that Steve and I quite like it. Shaun, safe kind of that number. But there's something kind of more and more excitement from my side, and that is the runway, the headroom that we've still got. Pre-COVID, if we look at the commuter, we turn back to the computer, pre-COVID, the commuter market was made up of about 40% of all U.K. rail. And of that, half of it was all based on season tickets. In fact then, nothing was digitized at all. That's all changed. In the last month, Trainline has launched digital season tickets. And we've launched it across 5 U.K. train operating companies. It's a massive, massive moment for the industry and it's going to keep on getting better because throughout all of the summer, we're going to be launching on more routes and with more train operating companies as well. And that entire technology is underpinned by new digital ticketing standards, sTickets. And if you allow me just for a couple of minutes, I'm just going to kind of give you a little bit insight into sTickets. And there's a reason for it that sTickets is a new standard the industry first. It was one led by Steve and a number of his team, where we have been the first time to propose as a third-party retailer a new ticketing standards and Trainline has done that. And it just goes to show just how close we are embedded within the rail industry, both in the U.K. and internationally. And this new standard is a massive win for both the customer and for the industry. For the industry, they can sell high-value tickets now. They can do it because they're sure that it's highly secure and there's great revenue protection. And it's got an added advantage that there's not the distribution costs, the paper tickets, plastic, is all around fantastic. And then on the customer side, kind of what not to love. It's quick. It's seamless. You don't have to queue like that picture just before. But also as well in the past, where you have to carry 2 different tickets, a ticket and a photo card. No chance of losing either of those anymore, they are both embedded onto your phone. And another way in which we've integrated that entire experience is where we've got tickets and journey information all together in one place for the first time. We said back at the start of the pandemic, it was clear that the world of work was going to change where many companies, they took the decision that they had to scale back. We took a bit of a contrarian view. So we invested significantly in our products in order to prime our mobile app experience for the commuter and for the new needs of the commuter. And it's been really, really working. So far, we've recently launched save your favorites. The save your favorites now has hundreds of thousands of commuters, who have all given us their details to allow us to help them personalize their journey and within a couple of clicks, we can really simply just book a new ticket, which is simple when you think about I want to be able to take that same journey over and over again, just remove all the friction. And in addition to that, we've been sprinkling innovation throughout the entire products as well. Good example, we've taken GPS and live real-time movements of trains. We're enabling commuters to be able to easily say what train am I on? They might as well, hang on, of course everybody knows which train they are on, why would I need that at all. But just think about that moment you run through the barriers, the doors are shutting in, and you get straight onto the train, and then thinking where is this train going? Is it on time? Or am I going to get to the meeting in time or not? This feature is now how to do that. All of those added up are helping us ensure that there's been a 27% increase in the number of time checkers, who are now purchasing on Trainline versus this same period pre-COVID. Now earlier on, you also heard from quite a few of our customers, and we love listening to our customers. And now many of those customers that were talking about cost planning and booking, but they were also talking about all the experiences post travel. And the Trainline app is a companion for the commuter throughout their entire experience. And it is a monumentally big task across all of that. We've got data science teams. We've got engineering teams that are ingesting thousands of messages every single minute. They're doing it, and they're trying to detect in real time, have there been changes from what we expect. Can we determine whether there are disruptions, whether there's delays, whether there's platform changes. And when we spot them, we've got to get out to the customer in seconds to ensure that they're aware when the disruption occurs. In total, on peak days, we send 137,000 notifications to our customers. That's 137,000 moments where Trainline are alleviating where we are removing moments of customer anxiety. Now that is how you build customer loyalty and customer engagement. Shifting topics. There is one area the Trainline holds is very, very poor. Something that encompasses everything we do. And that is, how do we ensure that as a company, we just drive more and more people onto greener forms of travel, essentially how do we get them onto the trains. There is no question that rail is green. But what we've got to do is we've got to get more people onto it and convince some of the benefits. And one benefit that I particularly love, and it just hugely resonates with me, that every 1% in the U.K. of air and rail journeys -- so air and car journeys, I'm sorry, that we shift onto rail, we will be saving the planet 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Not crazy, it's also you think about it, though, 1 in 100 journeys, surely, we should be able to change that. But where do we start? Well, the product plays a critical part. First of all, we start with education. And Steve talked about some of the basics. So we'll go to first of all here to a basic carbon emissions. What is the carbon footprint of my journey and 16 kilograms, 10 kilograms, 5 kilograms, what does it even mean. That's what we hear from a lot of our customers. And a few months ago, we launched a brand-new feature, which was our carbon comparison, which allows any customer to be able to determine just how does their journey compare to other modes of transport and in the future to compare to other things as well. Let's take Madrid to Barcelona, as an example. Madrid to Barcelona, if I take a rail journey versus a plane, I'll be using 7x less carbon emissions. That's a lot. Now the more customers know about it that's great. Now another reason why it's great is that particular route was the busiest corridor for air travel in all of Europe, pre-COVID. There were over 3.5 million seats on flights between Barcelona and between Madrid back in 2019. That's 3.5 million people, each using 7x more carbon than they would do if they were on rail. Connecting a few dots here, Steve was talking just before about the world of aggregation, and Madrid to Barcelona is one of those key routes for us. We offer all the choice on that route, enabling customers to find the best price, to find the best train on this high-speed route. And now they can combine that with understanding just what they're doing for the environment as well. It's massively, massively powerful. And beyond that, we want to encourage even more action. So focusing on a feature which we're going to be launching in the coming months. U.K. -- in the U.K., there are 13 million regular cyclists. And they all have slight challenges in trying to take a bike on a train. It shouldn't be that hard. So we're going to be launching the capability to enable to find a train, which can support your bike, and also importantly, to book your bike on that train. It should be at the end of the day, just as easy to be able to take a train -- to take a bike on the train as it should be to wheel the suitcase behind you. So we've got a world-class product. We have invested really, really heavily to date and it's great. As Steve was saying, we've got 4.9 app star rating. We've got 30 -- more than 30 million monthly active users who are happy. But I'm kind of not happy. I know we can do more. We're not stopping there. But one big area, which we're really excited about is around the world of intelligence. Now I previously worked at Spotify, So I've observed firsthand just how intelligence can unlock incredible features and really change behavior. Anybody remember Discover Weekly powered entirely by intelligence. Now Trainline, we're no different from that at all. We have incredible data smarts. We sit just at this confluence of all the rail supply. We've got millions of users giving us information and insight about their demand, which allows us to think about how do we innovate, how do we delight these customers. We're going to spend a couple of minutes now just focusing on a few examples of capabilities and features, which we'll be launching over the next 12 months. Those features are things that we will make successful. Others may be able to bring these to the market, but not with our scale, not with our proficiency, and certainly not with the level of customer experience. So first up, we've got price prediction. Steve referred earlier on to value just being one of the key, that is the key driver for customers, who are traveling on rail. And today, if I buy a ticket, really, you've got no idea. Am I going to be getting the best deal or if I should wait. Am I going to get a better deal if I wait a few days or if I wait a few days if the price is going to go up. Our teams are data science specialists. Our engineers, have managed to just kind of take all this data, continually analyze it, and they've got a pattern now of price fluctuations. So we're going to be able to tell customers when the price goes up, when it's due to go down and just how much they can save, thereby eliminating one of the biggest challenges for people who are booking rail. That's pretty cool. Second up, I spoke just before about the new commuter experiences and the needs of the new commuter. And with hundreds of thousands of commuters already engaging with our experiences, you can just imagine about all this incredible data and insight that we've got to just make that so much richer. So we're excited, in particular, to launch predictive alerts. We'll be able to avoid missing that meeting in the morning, because rather than getting a notification to say, your train is running late that you were due to get on, why wouldn't you get that train. But in order to get to your destination, we'll tell you there's a train earlier, to [ ditch the cornflakes ], get out of bed earlier and get to the station if you want to make your meeting. And finally, another example, there were 350,000 fares. We've got 500 experts in here who are constantly trying to understand those fares. So it's no wonder that, even the frequent traveler struggles to comprehend exactly which fare they should be buying. Through some incredible analysis, amazing data science, we're building a pattern of each and every customer where we would be able to tell them just how much you could have saved last month or maybe for next month buy this ticket, because it's going to get you there so much cheaper. Buy a railcard, you'll save x amount. You should have bought Flexi ticket shown on that journey you take each morning. These are all things that we're going to be able to do within 12 months. So I wake up every single morning, which is a good job, but I wake up particularly excited, because I think we are in an incredible position to be able to change and to solve customer habits and to solve ultimately making rail much easier. You've heard in Platform One, we've got the foundation, which nobody else has in order to remove the significant complexity. Number two, we've got an award-winning app, which is both seamless and differentiated and without a doubt, the best in the market. And third, we have got so much intelligence that we can only just imagine what type of experiences we can build upon this, but which others could only just crave to have that type of insight. Thanks very much for listening to us today. I'm now going to hand it over to the operator to take few questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from James Lockyer with Peel Hunt.

Great presentation. Thanks for doing that at this time. Three questions for me, if you don't mind, please. Firstly, on the new commuter strategy, obviously, e-tickets are better than paper. But perhaps it's maybe one step more than potentially I'd still need to do. So obviously, contactless payment technology is also being rolled out and there are companies that are sort of using that. So I was wondering if you could talk about that and whether you might see that as an opportunity for Trainline going forward? Second question, could you talk about quickly how a new company integrates into Platform One? So perhaps if we take Travelport as an example, how long that integration took and why they picked Trainline? And what that means now for you having integrated with them? And then finally, you mentioned a lot of different types of data you get from the talks, ticket prices and delays, et cetera. But could you talk about some of the other high levels of data that you receive or could receive in the future to help you further improve your offering going forward?

Great. Thanks, James. So let me just -- why don't I ask Steve, why don't you take the first one?

Great. Okay. So I mean I think the question was about contactless ticketing. Now we -- of course, e-ticket is contactless to start with, but it's a radio based ticketing, we're interested in any form of ticketing that makes life better for customers. So 100%, and we've had amazing success with barcodes and we're interested in what comes next. As applying to pay-as-you-go, we see it's kind of a medium-term opportunity. Everything is made better with a world-beating app, but it helps with the customer experience and brings a lot of the value that we already have there. So for example, some of the limitations that you have at the moment tapping in and tapping out with a card, you can't see what you're going to be charged upfront and this matters to a lot of customers. You can't apply a railcard and we -- you'll know how heavy a team we are on digital railcards. So -- there's lots of other examples like that. So we would look to integrate some of the strengths we already bring in order to make pay-as-you-go work in the right way. And in that context, yes, we're enthusiastic about it and see an opportunity there.

I think the second part to James' question was around integration to Platform One, and how long does that take? How easy is it and Travelport was the example that James used. Dave, can you take that?

Yes, sure. What I'll probably do is, I'll maybe actually step back and answer it looking from 2 different angles because we've got a number of different integrations. So as a company ingesting from 270 different rail and coach operators then there's work that has to happen there. And those integrations can take anywhere from weeks to multiple, multiple months. And it takes multiple months, because more often than not, we're using our rail expertise to actually help them and guide them through the process of working with a third-party retailer. And the same is actually very, very true when it comes to our distribution partners that are integrating with us as well. So we have in our global API, an incredibly well documented, well-supported APIs that some travel management companies, online travel agents, they can get up and going in literally a matter of days. Others they'll need bespoke features, they'll need things that we have to work really closely with them for. But all along the way, it is something that we're working kind of hand in hand, but it's measured in weeks at the most mostly months.

And James, I think you and I have talked before about -- we're not dealing with typical standard APIs here. This is rail industry APIs, and it's pretty interesting. I think these guys have done a good job articulating. I think the third part of James' question was around data and what do we get today? And what might that look like in the future. Steve, is that one for you?

Yes, I can do. I mean there's certainly markets where we don't get as much realizations as we like we're always pursuing that, engaging with operators to get more. I think what excites me most is that the data that we can derive from our own customers. So we have a lot of customers. We know about travel habits, as Dave said, we'll start to predict things there and as Dave spoke, I think overuses the phrase confluence. We really are at this kind of confluence of the industry data coming in and our customer base providing us information. So today what really excites me there is how we can combine those, for instance, to learn from our customers that we've got more experts on trains traveling up and down the country, all day long. And what they can share with us back that we can use to kind of feed back into the customer experience and enhance the passenger experience of future passengers. So those opportunity there, I think.

Our next question is from Navina Rajan with Morgan Stanley.

Just had a couple of questions on the international app or the international functionality. You obviously mentioned a lot of advantages and your user experience and such. And just wondering how that translates to you rolling out the functionality within the international app, which is still competing with the incumbent talks there. What do you think will be the most meaningful driver? So that was just my first question. And then the second question is just on the digital season ticket, a really interesting point. I just wanted to get your thoughts on how the economics would compare to the paper ticket for that business as you roll that out?

Okay. Thanks, Navina. And so for the first question, international functionality, Dave, is that what you want?

Great question, Navina. So when we look at Platform One, ultimately, everything that we build gets built in a way in which we want to roll it out everywhere. It has the capability of being rolled out everywhere. At the moment, our focus both for international is upon, I guess, kind of the heartland of where we've grown in the U.K., which is around that kind of advanced booking the long-distance regional travelers. And we're going after those customers to try to kind of help them provide a service, which is just so much better than the incumbents. So for example, aggregation, we are the only place where a customer in France, in Spain, in Italy, can go to get an entirely independent view of what tickets are available with all the choice and all the options. Beyond that, there's opportunities for us to surface value in different ways. And we think there's great opportunities there to build features that people, let's say that we've kind of had in the U.K. that helped unlock just more savings for customers. And then, of course, there's just a whole world of post travel, where today, we can use the intelligence and the capabilities that we've learned from the U.K. to take those same types of experience and roll them out internationally as well. So we've got an app already. It does a fab job. It's kind of better rated than every single one of the incumbents already there. But the product development is very, very much focused on those customer needs, around getting the best price, the most friction-free experiences. And of course, sustainability will continue to play a part in everything we're doing there.

Very good. Okay. So the second part of Navina's question is about digital seasons and the economics of digital seasons. So maybe I'll start, and I'll hand off to Steve. So look, the digital season ticket like season ticket, every season ticket has a 2% commission. And the cost of sale, the variable cost of sale is the payment costs. There's a fulfillment cost. And there is, I guess, there's a bit of variable systems cost related to the cost and potentially a bit of customer service costs wrapped into that as well. And so the important thing to remember about digital seasons is the average transaction value is high, right? So although the commission level is low relative to what we think it should be, the absolute return on selling a digital season ticket is pretty good, okay? And then you think about the cost of customer acquisition, one of the advantages that we have at Trainline is we have millions of customers already using our products, buying the tickets all the time. And we have millions more that are using our product to get live times and platform updates and disruption alerts, all of those things. And so the customer acquisition costs for us of getting people into digital season tickets, we think will be pretty low, because those people are all -- these customers are already using our platform. So it's a case of telling you about what a great new product that we've got. Steve, why don't you talk about, so what's the scale of your ambition here in terms of digital season tickets?

Okay. So well, if we look back 2 years, we haven't sold the digital season tickets, right? But our share of seasons rounded down to like something pretty low.

Rounded to zero.

Rounded to zero, fine, okay. And I think a large part of that was just the lack of product marketplace, where we do really well when we've got a ticket that lives on the customer's phone. We don't really want to sell a ticket if you wait to arrive in the post, but you have to do it manual. You go to -- queue up at one of those station machines like Dave was showing to pick up your weekly or monthly, it's just not the experience we deliver. So I think what really shifts to me in terms of the customer proposition here is the instant download of a sTicket or our Flexi season -- digital season ticket. So you can literally be walking towards the barrier purchase it and buy it in 20 seconds. And that kind of changes the customer experience so much. And we're starting to see some significant growth there now and a really good repeat purchase rates and all the things you'd expect to see with better product market fit. And then also in terms of the availability, as Dave said, barcode is really kind of spreading out to fill in some of the gaps like Southeastern has started rolling out barcode now. So we see it just fitting really well into the market, and we want to get it absolutely everywhere it possibly can be. So the aim is to get it rolled out across the network, across all train operating companies, so there's a season ticket in the U.K. absolutely everywhere we can in the next year.

Fantastic. And look, we just think this is the next leg of the journey, of the digitalization of tickets. So what you've seen how existing penetration as clients and accelerated actually during COVID and digital seasons, I think, is the next opportunity. Good questions.

The next question is from Ciaran Donnelly with Liberum.

Three from myself. Firstly, just on penetration levels in international. I mean I can see clearly, it's growing quite quickly. But I'm still surprised it's not actually higher than where it is. I mean I'd be interested to hear your views kind of any kind of user experience data feedback that you've got as to why perhaps is a higher proportion of desktop or it's just on a natural progression path as it was in the U.K.? Any differences there? Two, just on the digital season tickets. I wonder if you've seen any differences in sales rates achieved amongst the 5 talks that you've rolled out with and any learnings you've got from kind of initial data in terms of how they've approached it from their end. And then three, I'd be interested to hear what's your view on how you could kind of take a larger share of that commuter market going forward, convert more of those time checkers. Is it development of kind of a fully integrated contactless offering? Or what do you think is the key to converting more of those commuters?

Great questions. So the first one, our app penetration. So remember, in the U.K., 85% of all our tickets are sold on the app, and it isn't at the same level in international. So Dave, why isn't it higher?

I guess for me, first of all, it's super excited that we've got all this massive kind of headroom for it. One of the kind of the key reasons, of course, is people plan and travel, and particularly what we've seen through all the research we've been doing, then desktop has been the place where people are planning travel. They plan leisure trips. The mobile is almost kind of the companion to serve micro moments of planning and then people come back to the device. The second one, of course, is one of the big goal that we have to do is to keep on driving our awareness or a consideration and ensure that we get the app in the hands of people as well. There is a barrier, before you get the app in the hands of people. So the web is a fantastic place in order to drive people from web to app. And that is one of those big things that we're investing in very, very heavily at the moment. But Shaun if you've got other kind of things that you want to add?

I guess, typically, I think the U.K. is furthest ahead when it comes to our penetration. That's not just in the rail sector. It is, in general, it's true. And so I think there's just -- as Dave said, there's a bunch of headroom for us here, and our app penetration has a long way to go in Europe. And also, we focused on getting our app into more and more customers hands. So we are very focused on getting up downloads and driving our balance, because we see that as a great lead indicator for future sales and future usage. Yes, we're absolutely focused on getting the app into customer's hands. And we're also still -- we are just earlier in our international markets than we are in the U.K. So we've got a bunch of work to do, bunch of development in app to do, but it's a big focus out there. I think the second question here was about digital seasons. And what's happening with -- in the prior talks where we rolled out already, but it's pretty early days, Steve, what are you seeing?

So I mean it is very early days. We piloted with GTR, which is the largest stock owning group in the U.K. We've run that through January, February, March, and we accredited in April. And we're now kind of rolling out wider that. So we've had really good results there, both in terms of the sales and the customer experience and also the frontline experience. So it's working for the train operating companies. That was proved on quite a large scale over several months, before we accredited. So we're super confident about the product now. It's a bit early to say for the other talks. We've also gone live on our partner talks are rolling it out as well. So an advantage of Platform One is that you build it, and it's there for all top white label partners as well, which really helps with kind of industry engagement. It's not just kept to Trainline, it's a thing that the whole industry is a standard that we've retained no intellectual property on, which is we've built it. We benefit from it and the industry benefits from it. So I don't think we could share more on figures at the moment, it's too early to say. But I know they're super enthusiastic about it and want to get it rolled out as widely as possible. Of course, on the [ C side ], we go live at the same time, so we're sending teams there as well.

I think one of the super exciting things as well for the digital season, as you just think about the relationship you build with a customer. So we know the origin they're going from, we know the destination we are going from. We know the frequency of which they're traveling as well. The ability for us to target the marketing, CRM, brand and really kind of focus brand in certain origins or destination. It's just an entirely new area for us to go after, and it's all upside.

Absolutely. And yes, if you think about that season product, that digital season product, I guess as the finance guy, I think about it almost as a subscription type product, make it super easy to rebuy the next digital season ticket. That scales the use case that we're looking to build here. I think the third question was around the commuting experience. And what are we doing to build great products for commuters? And then how do we convert time checkers. So again, Steve, will you take that one?

Yes. I mean the first thing is like building the right experience for them. And so it's a very different use case. When you're looking at a range of trains that you might take in the morning, you don't want to know if a particular train is delayed is more like how is my route this morning? And is my morning going to be hell or not? And we can solve that in a really good way, and we can bring people in through favorites and through notifications about that commutes overall, which gets them news again. So that's call them in, get really familiar with Trainline and using on a daily basis to make their commute better. And that's going to make it easier to convert them, right? And within that, we can make it really easy to convert. So we know what they do every day. We know, we can recommend what the right ticket is. We have a Quick Buy approach so that you're not retyping anything, just like that buy my usual ticket. And that's going to become a really smooth purchase flow as we build out our commute offering to customers. And I think then the other option in the future, looking a bit further ahead, I'm really excited by some of the things that are becoming possible is the next version of iOS. So you can get an option where you're kind of offering the customer the usual tickets without them even opening the app and buy using Apple Pay. So you kind of get some sort of infinite conversion state where without even opening the app you pay [indiscernible] prospect. So we know everything about that we know what time of day they buy the ticket, we know what route they take. We know we can recommend the best ticket and we get to a point where just making it as easy as possible to buy it. And once we unlock that kind of thing, I think we'll be converting pretty impressively.

I can imagine that would be, we convert a customer to a sale before they even visited the app, it's nice.

We're already pretty good at conversion anyway.

The next question is from Gareth Davies from Numis.

One quick follow-up to Ciaran's question and slightly naive on my part, but you didn't call out digital ticket availability as a sort of hindrance to expansion in the European market. Is that simply because you've got an incumbent player and the digital ticket availability is there, it's just the consumers' reluctance to get on the app, but that's the issue. So where are we in those European markets versus the U.K? And then the second one is really around the innovation pipeline and sort of you've given us some examples of what's coming this year. But can you talk about the longer-term pipeline and sort of how you think about, how you prioritize or what determines, what sits at the top of the kind of funnel versus the bottom in terms of investment decision and how long term you're thinking on that?

Yes, absolutely. So good questions. So the first one is about digital ticket availability. So in Europe, it is -- digital ticket availability is widespread, right? It is all tickets, I think, just about anywhere are available in digital tickets. Really it's the combination of the app experience and the digital ticket availability. And of course, we are now rolling out our app and getting our app into the hands of many more customers. So I think it's a combination of those 2 things that's held back up penetration in rail ticketing. So, yes, we consider it part of our role, Gareth, to drive that up penetration and therefore increase digital ticketing as we did over the number of years.

And from a CapEx perspective, in terms of the stations, et cetera, everything is there, everything is right. So is...

Yes, exactly. It's -- the structure exists, exactly. It's about getting the app into more customers hands. And the second part of your question was about the innovation pipeline and like how do we prioritize that. And Dave, we've got 500 rail engineers. I mean how many are focused on product innovation?

All right. It's sort of third question. So I'll pick into those apart. So as Shaun said, we've got 500 engineers within Trainline and essentially, all 500 of those are focused on Platform One and product development, every single one of them. Now if we break that apart a little bit, roughly 1/3 of that team are focused on building the core platform, those core capabilities, scaling the platform and ensuring ultimately it is operating with the performance we need. That leaves about 2/3 of those engineering teams to focus entirely on new product development. So that innovation pipeline that you're just referring to there, Gareth, and that's across both the B2C product that we've got trainline.com and the apps as well as through our other tenants that are served through Trainline Partner Solutions. If we then look at how we prioritize, then I guess it's going to be pretty familiar. We referenced the use of data. We referenced the use of customer intelligence a lot. And we try to take all of that ultimately form some insights, form some beliefs. We have a set of ultimately objectives and key results that they span the entire company from the top to the bottom, cascade up, cascade down. And what we try to do is we try to kind of create a balanced portfolio of investments. So that balanced portfolio of investments will be focused on things that deliver value for acquisition, they drive conversion, they drive retention engagement or indeed the monetization elements of our products as well. So we have all of this kind of going at any one time. And we just try to balance what would be the constant stream of always on optimization with some bigger swings of the bat and big bets which -- some of them might return in 1 year, some of them might return in 2, 3, 4 years. And just ensure we've always got that balanced portfolio. And part of it as well is I think kind of just as someone leading product, recognizing as well what we do prioritize that we're not so regimented in stuff to that priority and always kind of one of the mantras that we have within the wider product development team is. We want to absolutely kind of fail fast, but we want to learn even faster. So the things that we prioritize are working, we're going to get that insight quickly, and we're going to end up then kind of coming back to address and change the prioritization as much as possible. So the final part is that kind of what does that pipeline start to look like? And I suppose the very kind of -- one of the things we talk about a lot about is our unique value proposition. And our unique value proposition for us then it consists of essentially trying to drive smarter travel. So number one, how do we offer unrivaled value, better and better value for our customers. You saw some of it today. We're going to use even more of our intelligence to unlock more of that value for new segments like the commuter, et cetera. The second thing we're going to be investing in there a lot is around the friction-free experiences, that particularly comes to life with the additional choice you're getting for the liberalization of the routes across Europe. And third is all going to be around sustainability. How do we drive modal shift? So we can drive awareness now, we can drive a change on our products, but also how do we go out further than Trainline and ensure that we're changing behavior right at the moment where people have that intent and considering rail or car in the first place.

You mentioned failing fast. I think it's kind of -- it's important philosophical point, right? We empower our product and engineering teams, in some case it gets wrong, right? Because if they're not getting wrong, they're probably not pushing out.

They are bit safe.

Yes. They are bit safe. Dave, do you want to?

Yes, sure. So I guess you are never right, 100% of the time. If you are right 100% of the time then frankly, you have been too safe. And as a company, we've got the scale. We've got the scale to allow us to place multiple bets and to fail sometimes knowing that we are going to win, are we going to be right the majority of the time. And I think if you look at any big company, which is dominant in their industry. I mentioned Spotify before, Spotify as a company, which places bets all the time, experiments, only a fraction of whatever gets out into the market is ever kind of -- was kind of -- sorry, you only see a fraction of what's being built on what gets to the market, we are exactly the same. We want to ensure that we've got that. So we've got a constant stream of experimentation to just keep on learning all the time from our customers. And we validate it customer experimentation. We validate it through customer research. We've got teams in all of our local markets who are just close to the customers we've got today, but also the types of customers we want to have tomorrow.

Great. And Gareth, I think you have a follow-up question?

Yes. And well, it related to that last point, really. And so if you took the example of Italy, how much resource are you finding you're having to put as you evolve in a market into sort of market-specific products? I mean you touched on using train numbers rather than kind of generic station. Is there much of a differential in behavior that's forcing resource to go that way? Or was it a...

The high level approach we think both, so we think if you think of 80% of what you see at a market level is consistent across in our case. So think of the Platform One. So I think the payments, search capability, all of these things, they consist another 20% we think of as localized for the market. Dave, just elaborate on that a bit maybe.

Yes, that's absolutely right. So we have teams that we spin up for -- to ensure essentially that we are building features, particularly when we enter a new market, where we know we've got kind of a larger gap to product market fit. So we've got teams that are optimizing just addressing where there might be areas, where there might be kind of steps in the funnel, which are just slightly out, where we need to change [ coffee ]. All the things that maybe in the U.K., which are now kind of -- that's just the bread and butter of what we do, and we have teams to do that. But then we also recognize through the research. But ultimately, everybody's needs are quite similar. They want the best value. They want the best choice, but the way in which they go about it and they achieve it is quite different than new ones. So we spin up our teams, cross-functional teams, with marketing, with brands, with data to allow us to actually kind of build capabilities that we can then roll out. So I'll take an example, Recup'Retard in France or as you gave the example in Italy, the ability to search by train ID. There's always opportunities for us to launch new features that either give us a differentiating factor or they help us close a gap in terms of expectations for the customer.

We are one hour on the clock. So we've got a few more questions. So the next question.

The next question is from So Karin with JPMorgan.

I was just wondering if you could please elaborate kind of on how defensive Trainline's technology you see could be kind of against competitors, who could potentially try to replicate?

I said that -- you. So I think I used the word complex. And the intelligence is just incredible in our platform. So for the sophistication of the platform and the scale, the ability to just ingest and process so much data is 1 part of the scale that we have is just really difficult to replicate. The second part, the technology as well, as we go deep, we go so deep into markets here in the U.K. we gave the example of sTickets and actually defining standards. We're working day in, day out. So for any new customer, any new companies come into this space, they are so far back behind us in 1 billion of those relationships, but then secondly, having to kind of create that know-how and that knowledge. I don't know, Shaun, Steve...

I would add something. I mean, look, you heard before Karin, that -- and we've got 500-plus rail engineers and nobody has the scale. Scale is our friend. Nobody has that sort of scale to be able to deploy that sort of engineering horsepower. And what that means is that our pace of innovation and the rate at which we're adding new products and new features is just vastly quicker than anybody else in our space. So not only we got this defense, this moat around the business, but we're accelerating away at the same time. So actually, the gap between us and the rest is only getting bigger.

Yes. 100%. I think you could always kind of look at it as well, I mentioned 270 rail and coach integrations. Every single one of those has the potential to just add more and more complexity on platform, more overheads to support it to the point that you drown, but we've invested in just making that so, so efficient. Just worked so well that it just become now almost kind of business as usual for us to support that, which allows us and assures us to devote such a large percentage of all of our engineering effort on to delivering new products.

It's important to say those connections that we built, they're not static, we said it earlier. They're really not static. They're changing all the time. So think of this is -- the Chinese plates has been around, we've got 270 plates spinning at any point in time. And we've got to keep them spinning. And so we've got a whole team of people whose job is to maintain those connections and make sure they're fully functional and at the same time, we're building new products and new features. So it's the whole point of scale and being able to deploy that size of engineering team.

Absolutely. Even more so than that those plates, they fall off and any other company, they wouldn't even know they are falling off. We got to tell you they are falling off. We've built the sophistication to just constantly monitor. We've got the scale to see, well, if a transaction isn't going through here then something is wrong. If you're a small player, you just moved in here, you've got literally no idea whether a service is running right or whether it's not running right, we have that scale.

The Next question is from Ivar Kelly with UBS.

I think a lot of questions have already been asked, but just a couple of more, I suppose. Just in terms of the digital railcards, I mean, what do you see as the absolute opportunity there in terms of the number that you might be able to sell in. And what's the commission structure that you actually get on them? And secondly, I mean you talked about the use case in Europe where there is open access trains. I mean that's very obvious clearly, because you can access all the operators there. But for countries where there is no open access and there probably won't be any. What sort of ambitions do you have there? And what's the key selling points you got for that? And lastly, I mean, looking a little bit further afield or is there a point at which you might receive or get enough of the market share that you wouldn't actually need the full level of 500 engineers? Or do you think that there's always going to be scope for them to keep doing more?

Yes. Okay. Great question. So first one is digital railcards. So what is the absolute opportunity? You take the railcards, Dave.

All right. Well, so when we first started, we assessed the opportunity that there were roughly in the region of 6 million railcards that were in circulation. Now a year, year and a bit post launch, pretty happy here to be saying that we've already managed to secure more than 1 million of those railcards. And those customers have come across with high frequency, high transaction value, which is kind of fantastic to us. We do believe, though, that there are segments under 30s -- and there are certainly different kind of segments that still kind of untapped there. As to what the exact opportunity is where, I can't say for definite, I know it's much bigger than what it is now. So the 2 things we're really, really going to be focusing on is, one, how do we drive as many of those 6 million railcards onto a digital experience that is just way better. And secondly, how do we use some of the intelligence that we've got in the, probably I was just referring to before, to try to connect previous journey patterns, you predict what your future patterns look like. So we actually can do a way better job of actually providing the intelligence to say, you should buy a railcard, it's going to save you this amount.

Thank you. I think Steve mentioned how we use our customer research teams to get insights from customers. The biggest piece before we launched digital railcards, the biggest piece of insight we got on railcards was, I forgot my railcard, you cannot forget your digital railcard, because it's in Trainline and it is super easy and it didn't flow and you get discount, it is a great product. And the size, the scale of our ambition here, we'll I don't think we've got just a much better product than anybody else in the market. And why would you have to take a railcard anymore. So we've got huge ambitions in this, a real lock-in moments, I think, from our perspective. And the second part of your question that was on Europe and open access trends and competition in Europe, right? It was about -- yes, you get the use case where there is competition. But what about where there isn't competition now, why would people use Trainline in those markets, Dave?

So I think if you look at that kind of again through a few lenders. So to start with, what do we got are very core in our products. So they're very core of our product, we've got experience, which is incredibly localized and just incredibly seamless. It's super simple. So compared to SNCF, SNCF there are multiple steps in order to buy an SNCF ticket. Trainline has 4 steps. It's just inherently much, much easier. So that is very kind of simplest is convenience is something which I think is already a significant USP for us. Second part will, without a doubt, the intelligence, even with a single -- a single provider, we can keep on building intelligence about the wider demand pattern as well as just customer behavior in there, which we can build experiences, particularly post travel, where we know that there's opportunities to both win huge favor, but you can also lose favor very, very quickly with customers. So for us, they're just getting that post purchase experience, right, is absolutely key. And finally, I will say to the point about no competition, competition is increasing on more and more routes. And even where it might be a single provider, in many cases, those providers are operating with multiple brands and to the customer, this is the outflow, they pay the same thing or they don't. And what can we do there to actually kind of help a little bit more we'll have to do the application sometimes.

And what we would say is check out the operating of the incumbent carriers. And then compare them to our operating and I think that'll just give you a sense of the difference in customer experience that these guys have built versus what the incumbent carrier apps deliver. It sure can change really. And I think the third part was about like I was concerned, Dave, that you got too many engineers. So on what point do you think is ever a point that we don't need 500 engineers?

So I'm currently imagining that Milena, our CTO, is just outside of this room at the moment, wondering what I'm going to say at the moment. But no Shaun, we will never not require 500.

Why do you need by the way?

What we will keep on doing, though, is we will keep on working on how do we drive more and more efficiency into the way in which we build products, which allows us to devote more and more of our capacity to new product development, either for B2C or for partners through Trainline Partner Solutions. Whether there will be more of a shift to further data led, more intelligence-based products, but I absolutely don't think we will ever need less than 500 engineers.

Very good. We're up against the clock. Probably got time for 1 more question. I see 1 more question.

Yes. There is the last follow-up question from Navina Rajan with Morgan Stanley.

Just so I sneak in a follow-up. On the season ticket, could you give some context perhaps on just if you look at the U.K. market, the amount of volumes or transactions that are made through season tickets. Just trying to get a sense of framing it and the opportunity. And then while I'm here also on the monthly active users, 30 million monthly active users, how does that sort of compare in terms of people that use rail more broadly?

They're good questions. Let me help on the first one. So context on the U.K. market volume transactions -- so right now, Navina it's pretty hard to know exactly. What we see is a bounce versus pre-COVID, season tickets are about a market level or about 40%. Steve, 40% of where they were pre-COVID if I am right? What's your view on where this gets back to?

I mean we've seen it growing. Obviously, the commute come back, it looks different. So regardless of the season, we're picking up a lot of customers for flexible tickets, singles and returns as well. So commute for us is growing. But seasons itself, I think, is gradually coming back. We're really not seeing lot of annuals at the moment. I suppose [indiscernible] maybe works for. We've got new flexi season products where that was the first digital season product that we launched, and we're sure that is good and our customers love it. So I think for weeklies and monthlies and possibly periodics, like between the month of a year that they're on the up and they're growing. We don't -- I don't think we have a sense of where they're going to top out for us. It's been a difference between having but no share there at all because we didn't have a good product. Now we have got a good product, it's like how many of those customers can we go after that we've got the best way of fulfilling a season ticket in the industry.

I would add as well. Essentially, we've got a complete product there. So we have the world of work has changed. People have hybrid patterns, some people are full time in. So we know everything that any commuter in a digital format on Trainline, So if you need a digital season, you've got it. If you need a Flexi, because you're traveling 7, 8 days a month, you've got it. If you just want to buy the season -- the daily railcard, the daily single or return, you got it as well.

And the second part of his question, very quickly, the MAUs, 30 million MAUs, how does that compare to -- so first of all, the 30 million is a total Trainline MAU number. The U.K. is number roughly speaking, 18 million MAUs, not the active users. How does that compare to total rail usage? Actually, Navina, I'm not sure we have a great answer for you other than it's a big proportion. So I can't give you an exact number, but it's a lot. And we are out of time, so I guess it's just for me to say thank you for the great questions. And for these guys for sharing their vision and their thoughts on product innovation on Trainline, it has been great. We leverage our platform, Platform One to provide customers with a one-stop shop for rail, right? That puts through industry complexity. And sitting on top of that is a differentiated customer experience that's simple and intuitive. And we're continually improving and optimizing our experience. We invest in product innovation and engineering. It's a point of difference for us. Nobody can deploy the kind of engineering horsepower that we can deploy, because of our scale. Scale is our friend. And looking ahead, well, we're going to increasingly use data and insights to deliver intelligent travel. We've got the biggest pool of customer data, transaction data available, and we will use that to drive product innovation in the future. So with that, thanks, Steve. Thanks, Dave. And thanks to all of you guys for a great questions and for listening.

Thanks.

Thanks.