Split My Fare was created by Tobias Biberbach and I (Pete Walls), friends since 9 years old when we went to school together in Northumberland. Our aim is to help passengers reduce the cost of previously unaffordable rail fares in the UK. This can allow people and their families who would otherwise be unable to travel to take their journeys. This concept of providing affordable travel is particularly important right now in the current cost of living crisis with train ticket prices rising and the British public feeling the pinch on their wallets.
Split My Fare is able to find big savings through split ticketing which involves splitting journeys up into separate tickets but customers staying on the same train. The platform has so far helped customers save on average 26% on their daily tickets with savings of over 90% possible. Our aim is to put split ticketing fully into the mainstream and make all train passengers aware that there is a way to get cheaper train tickets.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
The idea for Split My Fare was born when I was taking a train journey to Inverness from my home city of Newcastle. I was in a position where I was unable to travel due to a single train ticket being too expensive but had recently become aware of the concept of split ticketing. At this time split ticketing was very much a largely unknown DIY process with a need to use trial and error through numerous searches to find cheaper split tickets.
I was able to find a savings and take my journey but with this taking over half an hour I decided that this process should be made much easier with passengers finding the cheapest split tickets for their journey in much the same way they would normally book tickets.
Our company is unique in that we achieve our aim of providing the cheapest train tickets to our customers. In a comparison with the trainline we came out cheaper on 10 popular train journeys. While other split ticketing websites can have hard to navigate and slow websites we pride ourselves on offering a slick and easy user experience.
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How has the company/idea evolved over the last couple of years?
We invested a lot of time in developing our website in early 2020 to speed up the booking process, to simplify it in an industry where train ticketing can sometimes be overly complicated, and to provide an enjoyable user experience. Unfortunately the launch of our new website could not have been more ill-timed in March 2020.
From a previous position of strong growth and expecting a new website to further boost that we found ourselves in a position we could have never predicted where train travel reduced to almost zero.
We still held a passion and belief in our new website and continued to improve our user experience wherever possible. In June 2021 the work we had done started to pay off and we found customers shared our belief that we offered something unique, cheap train tickets through split ticketing with an excellent user experience. Since then we have found customers have really invested in what we offer and also enjoy the excellent customer support we pride ourselves on.
What can we hope to see from Split My Fare in the future?
We always seek to improve our offering of a fast and easy user experience and believe that launching a mobile app now will further boost this. The App will offer a simplified user experience, faster payments through Google Pay and Apple Pay, and the ability to quickly access e-Tickets wherever you are.
Split ticketing still isn’t fully mainstream with many passengers unaware of the cheaper train tickets they are missing out on. Especially in this cost of living crisis our aim of increasing awareness of split ticketing is stronger than ever.
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