The Seatfrog app’s flexible ticketing service is currently available on London and North Eastern Railway. It allows travelers to transfer their inflexible tickets to another train at another time for a nominal fee. More than 1.2 billion inflexible train tickets are sold every year. Griffin said people are coming back to travel by train, but one of the reasons traffic isn’t reaching pre-pandemic levels – apart from the current wave of strikes – is that commuters’ lives have suffered. exchange. “One of the reasons people don’t take the train more is that it’s inflexible.

It didn’t follow the way people live now,” he said.

Instead of going to the office five days a week, people work flexibly and can only spend one to three days in an office.

So they don’t want subscriptions and if they finish work early, they want to go home when they want rather than at a time predetermined by the tickets they have purchased.

He added that when people travel between cities, they are now more willing to pay for upgrades.

Launched in 2018, Seatfrog lets people bid on upgrades to first class or pay a low one-time fee.

Griffin said there are around 570 million empty first class seats that go unsold each year on Europe’s railways and that Europe represents a “huge opportunity” for the company, which has returned to the pre-pandemic trade levels within five weeks of the start of the first lockdown. in 2020.