29/06/2006

megatrain.com, Stagecoach Group’s budget rail initiative, has won a national award for innovation.

The popular web-based rail travel service, which offers fares from just £1, was a category winner at the Railway Industry Innovation Awards, winning the Ian Allan Publishing Award for Innovation in Marketing.

Stagecoach launched megatrain.com in November 2005, introducing the cheapest tickets on the UK rail network for decades.

Since then, around 640,000 people have visited the megatrain.com website and there have been nearly 70,000 bookings.

More than 5,000 cheap seats a week are now available on off-peak South West Trains services, Monday to Saturday, linking London with nine locations: Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Exeter, Salisbury, Yeovil, Bath and Bristol.

The concept has also been extended to than a fifth of all Virgin CrossCountry services, covering the Birmingham-Bournemouth, Bristol-Plymouth, Manchester-Edinburgh / Glasgow, Morpeth-Edinburgh and Plymouth-Penzance routes.

Ian Dobbs, Chief Executive of Stagecoach Group’s rail division, said: “I’m delighted megatrain.com has been recognised with this award.

“megatrain.com offers passengers bargain prices to a host of attractive destinations. The success of megatrain.com has demonstrated that we can attract new passengers to the railways and help make the most of the capacity on the rail network using flexible, value-for-money pricing.”

The budget rail service was launched following the huge success of Stagecoach’s market-leading low-cost inter-city coach operation, megabus.com, which now has a national network covering 40 UK cities and carries around 2 million passengers a year.

ENDS

For further information, please contact:

Steve Stewart, Head of Media and Public Affairs, Stagecoach Group
Tel: 01738 442111
or
South West Trains press office
Tel: 020 7620 5229

NOTES TO EDITORS

The Railway Forum/Modern Railways Innovation Awards 2006 recognises and publicises the huge amount of innovation in the rail industry.