Placing the tourist at the heart of a city’s mobility strategy

By Nick Mackie, Vice President and Global Head Urban Mobility, Visa

Every August, Edinburgh welcomes thousands of visitors as well as artists, musicians, and performers to the city for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival–a month-long celebration. Last year saw more than 5,000 productions in more than 300 venues throughout the city making moving that volume of people around that many events a challenge.

One of the ways Edinburgh addressed this difficulty was to encourage more people to use public transport and making that transport experience easier and more convenient through the integration of contactless payments.

Edinburgh isn’t alone. Manchester has also launched contactless transit across its tram network to help visitors and residents get to the city’s major hot spots. In fact, this year Visa has helped launch contactless transit in major destinations for tourists and business travellers, including New York, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Milan, Prague, Venice and Florence, among many others. And these cities are already seeing significant contactless uptake on their transport systems. For example, despite only launching contactless travel in May, New York surpassed its one millionth journey on the MTA in the first 10 weeks.

Tourism and mobility go hand in hand

When asked in a global survey, nearly half of the respondents said that one of the main hurdles to using public transport is how complicated buying a ticket can be. Add to that a language barrier or unfamiliarity with a potentially complex ticketing system, and a resident’s inconvenience becomes a tourist’s impediment.

Looking to the horizon, addressing the needs of tourists extends beyond existing public transportation. Helping people get from their hotel or Airbnb to a museum, amusement park or other attraction might involve multiple modes of transportation–one of the most important being how they get from their front door to the train or bus and then from the train or bus to their destination. Integrating public and private transportation services and managing them through a single seamless platform is an ambitious vision with the potential to revolutionise the daily travel of visitors and residents, alike.

At Visa, we work with government authorities, public transport operators and technology providers to collaborate and implement connected technology systems and strategies that help increase convenience for the customer and the efficiency of the commuter flow. Contactless transit has improved the customer experience, making journeys across multiple modes of transportation faster and simpler. What’s more, contactless technology removes the need to plan ahead, purchase, carry and keep track of a variety of passes and tickets.

By bringing key players in the mobility ecosystem and coordinating strategies between them, Visa can help public transportation function more effectively, reducing road traffic and congestion. This assists host destinations in accommodating actual or potential visitor numbers and flows, and keep the quality of tourist and resident experiences high even when the numbers of passengers continue to increase. Just making it easier to get from point A to point B can help make almost any city a better place to visit! Working in partnership, we can make this vision a reality.

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