How the Trainline wants to turn rail travel on its head

“Customers around the world endure stress buying train tickets.  Our mission is to solve that and put all the options into one app, so people can go anywhere they want to with one click.

“We can be of huge benefit because people take an average of 20 minutes queuing to buy tickets at rail stations.

“It’s very early days for us. Our £2.3bn of annual sales is 1pc or 2pc of the European rail market. So we’re in high-growth mode now. We see huge opportunity to move that 80pc to a much easier and more streamlined way of booking a ticket.”

Trainline, founded in 1997 by Virgin Trains, was sold by a consortium including Virgin to Exponent Private Equity in 2006. It has been led since 2014 by the Irish-born Gilmartin, who became CEO when six months pregnant.

Gilmartin says Trainline is profitable, though it has been busy investing in its brand and business since the private equity group KKR bought a majority stake from Exponent in January last year.

“The thinking was always to bring together first the whole of Europe and beyond that the whole of the rail network into one app,” Gilmartin continues.

“The highest growth part of the business is on mobile phones, which are now a natural place to buy a train ticket. Our growth there is more than 100pc a year and we’ve been working with the industry to expand the rollout with e-tickets.

“Two years ago, Britain had 7pc e-ticket availability. We’re now at 50pc and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has said that Britain will be at 100pc in e-ticket availability in 2018.

“What that means for consumers is no more queues. One of our real focus points is to take unnecessary stress out of rail travel.”

Trainline, which has offices in London, Edinburgh and Paris, employs 430 of its 500 staff in the UK and prides itself on being customer-friendly.

This summer, it relaunched its service for small and mid-sized businesses, claiming to offer discounts of 30 to 40pc on rail travel when booking in advance. It also has a bot that trawls data from its 30m monthly customer visits to its websites to ensure it is offering the best prices.

Then there is a “GroupSave” feature that identifies when people are travelling together and lets them know of discounts, and a “BusyBot” service.

“BusyBot allows customers to identify where they’re going to get a seat and which carriage is quietest. It’s all designed to give customers more information. For the first time, we’re crowdsourcing data,” Gilmartin says proudly.

“More than 12m people have our app in the UK, putting us second only to Uber in travel apps, and a huge number are feeding back to us on their journeys how busy the carriages are.”

Until this year, Trainline only sold tickets for travel in the UK, Germany and Italy. However, after the purchase in March of the French online ticketing group Captain Train and an agreement to sell tickets for the Spanish rail operator Renfe, it now pretty much covers Western Europe, working with train companies to supply tickets for journeys in France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia.

“We’re constantly adding new carriers every few month,” Gilmartin says. “We’re close to complete in Western Europe, so we’re now looking to Eastern Europe and beyond that in the US and Asia, where it’s very difficult to buy train tickets online, even in some of the major rail markets.

“If you go online today and try to buy a rail ticket in Japan, you’re going to find it hard. We’re looking at Japan, South Korea and China. Our vision is ultimately to be global."

Trainline was sold just before it was due to float. Does she regret not getting to the market?

“To be honest, we would have run the business the same either way,” she says. “I’m happy with where we are. We have a shareholder who is very aligned to us as a team and to me as a CEO.

“We’re here to grow the business, to bring rail online, and we want to have a rail app in everyone’s pocket so that they can go anywhere they want in one click. Despite the current volatility, people still need to travel so we’re not really seeing any major impact.” 

Recent rumours have suggested that KKR has started looking again at a Trainline float. Are they true?

Gilmartin seems surprised. “You know what? That’s not something I’ve picked up,” she says. “They bought our business last year and they’ve always been clear that they’re in it for the medium to long term.”

So she’s not aware of any KKR plan for a Trainline float? “No. Absolutely not,” she replies. Nor does it seem likely to Trainline will buy anything else in the near future.

“It would be hard for me to ever rule it out,” Gilmartin says, “but for now we don’t have any plans to acquire and indeed there’s nothing else of any significant scale for us to buy. Our near-term expansion plans are organic.” 

Gilmartin, 40, who hails from Dublin, where she studied international commerce and German at UCD, started her career in sales and marketing at Unilever. She then worked for Boston Consulting Group in London and spent ten years at eBay, where she was vice-president for the UK and Greater Europe.

She is now something of an evangelist for modern railways. “I’ve become a complete convert,” she declares. “The days of the dusty old carriage are long gone. For too long, rail has been seen as complex, hard to figure out and not particularly customer-friendly. We want to turn that on its head.

“This is a golden time for rail now; a renaissance. There’s been huge investment in the last 15 years in the high-speed rail network across Europe, which has increased six-fold over the past decade and is set to double again over the next ten years.

“It’s totally changing how people travel. In the UK, we’re going to see a 32pc increase in the number of seats in England and Wales by 2019. It’s a dramatic expansion.”

Now she’s back to talking numbers again. Even without another float, Trainline has plenty of steam behind it for now.

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