In December 2024, Littlepay partnered with Google and Go-Ahead in an industry-first promotion to offer free travel on Brighton & Hove Buses as an incentive for passengers to activate Google Transit Insights (GTI) in their mobile wallet. 

Passengers using bank cards are typically unaware of their capping status, the free rides they are given, the expiry time of a time-based ticket or their journey history. There is no obvious channel to engage with these passengers and provide this data.  Littlepay and Google came together in 2023 to solve this problem by surfacing all this data into the mobile wallet in real time. The resultant product, Google Transit Insights (GTI), launched on Brighton & Hove Buses and is now being rolled out nationally.

As an early adopter of GTI, Brighton & Hove Buses was in a great position to trial a new travel incentive campaign with the aim of increasing passenger adoption and assessing the effectiveness of free travel incentives as a means of increasing the use of public transport.

Working together, the teams launched a free seven-day travel pass promotion. With Littlepay managing the technical elements of the project, Google and Go-Ahead facilitated a marketing campaign to promote the incentive to riders across Brighton & Hove Buses media channels. The result was a fixed-term reward travel pass through a digital wallet and associated payment card – a global first collaboration between payments providers, digital wallets and transport operators.

“We are grateful to the ongoing initiative of our partners at Littlepay and Google for another robust, forward-thinking and high-value delivery. Our hope is that our future collaborations will continue to further improve the customer experience and we welcome that all parties put the customer at the heart of innovation.”

said Sean McLaughlin, Group Senior Solutions Manager at Go-Ahead  

A travel incentive that promotes full transparency

The teams mobilised in just six weeks, by utilising the existing functionality of the Google-Littlepay GTI, to launch a campaign in December 2024. 

The fixed-term free travel incentive was available between 16 and 22 December 2024. Before going live, the campaign was advertised from 2  to 14 December across Brighton & Hove’s social media, posters, bus screen ads, and website. During this time, Littlepay tokenised the qualifying cards and recognised the registration for GTI. Littlepay already had the ability to register cards for discounts and was able to detect GTI registrations, link the preferred card to the discount and provide the week of free travel automatically. The riders could then access their GTI account to view how much they saved per trip.

Following this week-long campaign, the results are hugely encouraging, showing:

This week-long campaign demonstrates that promotions targeting contactless EMV customers can be hugely effective. Public transport use for riders that use digital wallets can be encouraged by leveraging the additional benefits offered compared to closed-loop cards and physical tickets.

“Working with Google and Go-Ahead to leverage our functionality to support a trailblazing campaign is exactly the kind of collaboration that moves the industry forward. The results have underscored the level of loyalty and passenger engagement that can be achieved by giving riders visibility. This serves as a blueprint for operators looking for new ways to connect with passengers and deliver rewards using their payment card through Google Wallet.”

said Sheryll Ricketts, Head of Solutions at Littlepay