The evolution of the travel industry, Mark Holt

Mark Holt, Chief Technology Officer at Trainline – Q&A with Irish Tech News

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

I lead Trainline’s technology team, made up of over 300 travel tech specialists and engineers. That team has an impact on everything we do at Trainline from helping our customers make 172,000 smarter journeys every day, ensuring information is flowing seamlessly from the 220 rail and coach companies we work with across Europe, to building world-first travel technology innovations.

It’s a complex, agile operation with the purpose of making the travel experience simpler, more seamless and smarter. My biggest priority at Trainline is to ensure that our talented team has got the right tools, the right work practices and the right culture in place to do this as effectively as possible – and that we’re top of the list of where the tech community’s best talent wants to work.

How was the last year, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

It’s been fantastic to see the real-world impact some of our technology has had on travellers over the past year. A year on from the launch of our Price Prediction tool – which reveals when Advance rail fares are likely to rise in price – we’ve seen that customers have saved almost £10 million by this feature helping them ‘see into the future’.

Alongside that, we launched the world’s first AI-powered disruption alerts for rail travel. When a customer journey changes it is essential they are given personal, contextual updates as soon as possible. We saw that operators were using Twitter to alert customers, and that these tweets were often released before the national rail data stream was updated. So, we built a custom AI that uses Natural Language Processing to ‘read’ those Tweets and automatically share relevant updates in our voice app with customers whose journeys are affected. It’s a fantastic technical achievement and showcases how tech advancements continue to improve the travel experience.

Navigating data in the rail industry, however, is complex. There are more than 27,000 rail stations and 18,000 coach stops across Europe, to give a sense of the scale of the challenge. Services provided by each carrier are varied and APIs don’t conform to any standard practices. As data standards are rolled out (at Trainline we’ve developed our own system to create uniformity) and other stakeholders open access to their datasets, this challenge will be overcome.

In the UK, the Joint Rail Data Action Plan from the industry body RDG (Rail Delivery Group) and the government’s Department for Transport is helping to reduce data barriers between operators and technology businesses. At Trainline we also recently opened up our data on 30,000 stops, stations and cities to the French government’s platform for open data, Etalab. We hope to see these more collaborative data sharing practices continue over the next year and with them a new set of travel tools.

What are your plans for the future?

We’ll be continuing to look at how we can offer users smarter, simpler and more seamless ways to travel across Europe and the rest of the world. We make more than 300 production releases every week, so expect to see a constant stream of tiny improvements; each of which adds up to create the best possible customer experience.

We’ll keep growing our network of the rail and coach companies we partner with and our best-in-class tech and data science team will build on the success of Disruption Alerts and Price Prediction to deliver plenty more exciting innovations!

What will you be talking about at Dublin Tech Summit?

I’ll be talking about the evolution of the travel industry on the HorizonX stage at 10:55 on Wednesday 10th.

I’ll be exploring how the travel industry has changed over the past two decades and the role of technology in shaping this transformation. In particular, I’ll be speaking about the impact of cutting-edge technology such as AI, big data and predictive analytics on creating smarter travel experiences, and what exciting new technology features travelers can expect to see further down the line.

What inspired you to attend it?

The growth of Dublin Tech Summit has been incredible over the past few years, it attracts some brilliant speakers from the likes of Google, Amazon and NASA as well as new innovators and a broad audience. It’s always a pleasure to speak alongside that company, learn about the latest innovations in the industry and meet fellow tech-enthusiasts.

We also had our Director of Data Science Fergus Weldon speak last year – after seeing what a success that talk was I couldn’t resist getting in on the action!

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

I’m definitely a geek at heart. Even though we’re 100% cloud, I still get excited about a new processor launch. So, I appreciate sites like ArsTechnica and AnandTech that cater to a more technical audience. Engadget is fun, to see what’s happening in consumer tech, and TechMeme is great for information on startups and funding.

And xkcd is obviously the first site I check every day 😉

How can people find out more about what you are working on?

For those visiting Dublin Tech Summit, come along to the talk and feel free to say hello afterwards!

For those who aren’t on the ground, we also have a great blog that our engineering department runs covering personal insights from our tech team, the latest projects we’re working on and broader features on current hot-topics in the industry.

You can also follow the Trainline Team on Twitter  or follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date on all our latest news.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking