Half a billion people worldwide will use their mobile devices as travel tickets on metros, subways and buses by 2015, according to new forecasts from Juniper Research. This is more than five times the number generated last year, but crucially Juniper is expecting usage to spread widely from the current concentration in Japan and several European countries. Outside Japan, systems in operation typically use SMS or bar codes.

Whilst SMS ticketing has been in operation for several years in large cities in Scandinavia and Central & Eastern Europe such as Stockholm and Prague, Juniper believes that recent momentum in Near Field Communications (NFC) will only add to market growth. As metro authorities begin the transition to open contactless payment systems, NFC ticket usage is forecast to grow significantly beginning in 2013.

According to Mobile Ticketing for Transport Markets report author Howard Wilcox: “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. ”

Furthermore, mobile ticketing also has potential across train and air travel, the latter driven by mobile delivered bar coded boarding passes.

Juniper’s new report contains comprehensive and detailed five year forecasting for all the key market parameters including users, transactions and values for airline, rail and metro/bus ticketing. Additionally the report highlights the conclusions from Juniper’s analysis of 23 vendors addressing the market, which culminates in a new Transport Mobile Ticketing vendor strategy positioning matrix.

The report also suggests that Western Europe and the Far East & China will be the leading transport mobile ticketing regions by volume in 2015, but poor user experience is an implementation risk – such as bar code reading issues.

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