Spark Digital Should Provide Ticketing Solutions for Auckland Transport
In our previous article, Spark Digital were providing technology solutions such as on-board WiFi, and a paperless ticketing system for SkyBus. SkyBus is a Melbourne-based company, which acquired Auckland Airbus in October last year. Auckland Transport on the other hand has its ticketing solution provided by Thales, a French company. And it’s been shit. Perhaps Auckland Transport should get Spark Digital to provide its tech solutions, for them.
Spark Digital are providing SkyBus with on-board WiFi, as well as having created SkyBus’ paperless ticketing system. The paperless ticketing system lets you get your bus ticket through an app on your smartphone. Putti, Spark’s specialist mobile app design unit, were responsible for this. I personally haven’t tried it yet, but I can just sense that it’s already better than what Auckland Transport are providing.
Currently Thales are providing Auckland Transport’s poor ticketing system, AT Hop. There have been lots of issues with AT Hop such as having to wait 24-48 hours for a credit card top-up to take place (Really?), having to wait 24 hours before a “tag on/off” will appear in your transaction list online (Really?), overcharging errors, and then having to wait between 7-14 business days to get a transaction reversed because it was wrong. Really?
Auckland Transport and it’s HOP website used to be crap as hell. Now it’s just crap. It’s new website still redirects you to the old HOP site when you want to see your transactions, and then there’s just a double up. Refunds can happen at both sites and is very hard to keep track of.
You know their site is bad when it still says at the bottom of the page:
Another reason the AT Hop site pisses me off is that when you’ve been logged out due to inactivity, you HAVE to close your browser before you can access the site again. So if you have a few important tabs open in Chrome, you have to close all of them before you can log back in! Shit!
There is just so many things wrong with the AT Hop system right now. Even after two years since it began its inception. Perhaps Auckland Transport need to ditch its contract with Thales and partner with Spark Digital (might I add that this is a NZ company rather than a French company!) to provide a working, reliable ticketing solution for Auckland and perhaps the rest of New Zealand. And while you’re at it, I don’t think the patrons of public transport would mind free WiFi on-board public transport!
