A new study has found that about half a billion people worldwide will use their mobile devices as travel tickets on metros, subways and buses by 2015.
New forecasts from Juniper Research in the report named "Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets" expects mobile phone usage for payments to spread widely from the current concentration in Japan and several European countries. Outside Japan, systems in operation typically use SMS or bar codes.
While SMS ticketing has been in operation for several years in large cities in Scandinavia and Central & Eastern Europe, Juniper believes that recent momentum in Near Field Communications (NFC) will add to market growth.
NFC ticket usage is forecast to grow significantly beginning in 2013.
Juniper’s new report contains five year forecasting for key market parameters including users, transactions and values for airline, rail and metro/bus ticketing.
Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report author Howard Wilcox said, "Whether by expansion of SMS and bar code delivery or by NFC, at Juniper we see convenience and choice for users as key advantages of mobile ticketing."
"It will be 2013 before large numbers of NFC enabled devices are in peoples’ pockets and our new report forecasts the impact on transaction volumes."
Mobile ticketing also has potential across train and air travel, the latter driven by mobile delivered bar coded boarding passes, says the report.
The report also says that Western Europe and the Far East & China will be the leading transport mobile ticketing regions by volume in 2015.
