I know mobile tickets have probably been around for a while, but honestly, my first time using one was about six months ago when I hopped a Bolt Bus from New York to Boston. For the uninitiated, Bolt Bus offers cheap travel, free Wi-Fi and a decidedly more wired-crowd than say, your average Greyhound or Peter Pan bus trip. Instead of having to swipe my credit card again (which was no doubt buried under other travel gear) or having to drag along a print-out of my ticket, I just had the bus driver check my iPhone. Easy, convenient and catering to me – marketing and customer service at its best.
A new study by Juniper Research released this month shows that mobile tickets will be a prime driver of mobile commerce going forward. It forecast $100 billion in gross transaction values by 2012, doubling what the 2010 market is worth. It’s not surprising given that if there’s one thing we all carry with us these days, it’s our phone. So if you arrive at a concert or a baseball game, why not hand over your phone?
The report found other areas of growth for m-commerce as well, including the mobile coupon market, which Juniper predicted would reach $6 billion by 2014. Here are a few others from the report’s author, Howard Wilcox:
Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth that we forecast across all the segments of mobile commerce. Four of these segments (Ticketing, Money Transfers, Physical Goods and NFC) will more than double in transaction value over the next two years, whilst Digital Goods, Banking and Coupons will still post very healthy growth of 30% to 50% over the two years.
