CEO Interview: Trainline Aims to Steal Airline Share Down the Line

Rail travel has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years. New high-speed rail lines are springing up across the world and the rolling stock used on existing routes is also being upgraded. While this is all good news, what is almost as important is the work going on behind the scenes. Unlike airlines, which have had their ticketing standardized for decades, rail transport remains fragmented and it has been left to individual companies to attempt to declutter the data and pull it all together. UK-based Trainline, the leading rail-bookig site in the UK, is one of those businesses. Just like with Sabre and Amadeus, Trainline was originally developed by a transport operator before being spun off. In 2015, private equity firm KKR bought the company for an estimated $756.5 million. Since the acquisition, Trainline has expanded, buying Captain Train in 2016. The deal not only improved its in-house technology, but also gave it greater access to European markets. This looks to have been a shrewd move given that rail travel continues to grow. In 2015, rail passengers increased by 2.1 percent to 9.4 billion, compared with the previous year. Trainline has also spent a great deal of time and money developing tools to improve the overall user experience. The latest of these is what it claims is the rail industry's first price prediction tool. The person who has driven this expansion is CEO Clare Gilmartin. We spoke with her about rail's ability to compete with air, the evolution of rail ticketing, and why there are so few female tech CEOs. Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Skift: Could you, for an international audience, explain how Trainline works and a little bit about its history? Clare Gilmartin: Trainline was started in the late '90s because the rail network was starting to fragment in Europe. We're now operating across 24 different European countries, serving customers in 173 different countries, and we have 137 carrier partners, so Trainline is one place where you can come – single app, website – and buy all of rail. Our mission is ultimately to create the world's single biggest rail platform, just making rail a lot more accessible for everybody, making it easy to compare across carriers, making it easy to buy and giving people a lot more travel information on the go through mobile specifically. Skift: In terms of your revenue stream, you get your money from commission from the train