The Estonian IT company, Turnit, has signed a deal with LTG Link, a passenger transportation unit of Lithuanian Railways, enabling Lithuanian train passengers to buy tickets using a mobile application.
Under the five-year agreement, the entire Lithuanian train ticket sales will be moved to the Turnit’s cloud-based solution called Ride. Under the €7 million contract, all existing and new ticketing channels will be assembled into a single omni-channel platform. For the first time, Lithuanian train passengers will have the opportunity to buy tickets using a mobile application, Turnit said in a statement.
According to the company, Turnit managed to defeat five strong competitors, including the German technical giant, Siemens, in the public procurement process. The new solution is planned to be launched by the end of 2021.
A long experience with bus operators
Turnit has so far offered ticketing solutions for bus operators, such as Estonia’s Lux Express; the railway sector is a new business segment for the company.
“In addition to the bus industry, many of our European customers today operate passenger trains. It is actually quite easy to adapt our solution to train ticket sales,” Andres Osula, the CEO of Turnit, said in a statement. “We have been developing and continuously improving our solution for the last ten years. The experience of our clients shows that a smart ticketing system helps boost the business of mobility operators, reduce their costs and increase profitability.”
Turnit’s full-service reservation and inventory management platform is currently used by more than 40 passenger transport companies in Europe, Africa and North America. The company processes more than 20 million tickets annually.
LTG Link operates 53 trains on 17 local and four international routes. In 2019, a total of 5.5 million journeys were made by Lithuanian Railway trains.
Cover: A passenger train of the Lithuanian Railways. Photos by Turnit.
