Trainline plc

Um, okay.

What year did you email Trainline rather than me-

[laughs]

... saying, "I've just had this workshop booking come through.

I'm not sure if I can do the date.

I'm a bit worried about it.

What do you think?" You sent it to Trainline rather than me.

[both laughing]

It'll be very interesting to see what comes out of it.

Now, just before I hand back to you, Nigel, since we're talking about London St Pancras High Speed, a couple of weeks ago, Steph and I went to an event at London St Pancras that was jointly hosted by Trainline and London St Pancras High Speed.

to coincide with the launch of a report that Trainline had commissioned on cross-channel rail.

The report highlights some really interesting trends around the effect that competition has on fares.

I mean, Italy, 14 years of competition have led to a 40% reduction in high-speed fares.

In France, Trenitalia have entered the Paris-Lyon corridor in 2021.

That's led to a 43% reduction in average fares.

And during the research that Trainline did in the UK, 74% of British people said lower fares from the UK to Europe by rail would make them more likely to take the train.

But really the LLMs, I still don't think are quite perfect for like that final draft of copy and it still needs the human love.

But as we've really now tried to push up market, we're trying to get more fantastic logos like, you know, Revolut, Klarna, Trainline, Customer Bank.

And we've also actually switched to doing lots of non-AI stuff.

And so one example is we're a huge fan of doing in-person video shoots.

There's plenty of apps.

There's, I think, TrainLine is one that I looked at, which kind of looks at all, like the Metro and the TGV and the WeGo, I think is how you would say it.

Okay.

Um, there's several different trains that come, you know, go through there.

Joanne says that there were five or six bidders who actually tendered in the first place.

Um, she said that the previous contract they had with Trainline prohibited ScotRail from making further developments that they wanted to make to the app.

Um, and she also said that Silverrail apparently made background changes to the operating system very close to the launch of the app, something like the day before, and ScotRail were not aware of them until very close, which is a bit of-

Wow

... testing.

It is a good question, isn't it? I mean, why did they switch off, uh, the ability to buy tickets with one app and then set the other one up without running the two in parallel? And Joanne said this, she said, "Part of our contract with the outgoing provider," i.e.

Trainline, "meant that there was no opportunity to do a soft launch because Trainline had exclusive rights to retail our tickets." Now, Willie Rennie quite understandably asked if Trainline had insisted on that point in the contract, and Joanne responded that she was informed that contractually we could not make the change on a phased basis.

So we don't actually know whether ScotRail even asked Trainline whether they could do a soft launch.

The DOT said it is reviewing the ruling and considering its legal options.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority has opened an investigation into Trainline and Virgin Atlantic as part of a broader crackdown on potential drip pricing.

Trainline is being examined over whether mandatory booking fees are properly included in upfront prices for rail and coach tickets.

Virgin Atlantic's investigation focuses on package holidays and whether the required hotel fees and local taxes are adequately reflected in its advertised pricing.

Both companies received advisory letters from the regulator in November 2025, but concerns remained.

Well, let's go to sort of transport tech services.

Let's go to Trainline, which is one of the cheapest tech services stocks to me on the market.

It's obviously got worries.

The investors are a bit cautious in terms of this new Great British Railways service going to be created in about a year's time.

On the 29th of July, the CMA launched an investigation into Microsoft 365 subscriptions, focusing on the rollout of Copilot and concerns around automatic renewals at higher prices.

It then opened a further three investigations on 19 August into alleged drip pricing involving Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and Red Driving School, examining whether mandatory fees and local taxes were being presented transparently to consumers.

Looking ahead, CMA is expected to provide an update on its investigation into Ryanair's family seating policy in December.

The government is also consulting this autumn on whether practices such as invented discounts should become banned commercial practices under the DMCC Act.

Didn't think about Uber.

We didn't think about Trainline.

We didn't think about-

Yeah