Catering for over 33 million passenger journeys per year nationwide Virgin Trains gets customers from locations spanning the whole of the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow. Having made the biggest investment in rolling stock since privatisation, Virgin Trains is publicly redefining the visible face of UK rail travel.
Virgin Trains has always been about more than simply travelling from A to B. Since winning the West Coast and Cross Country franchises, the company has been committed to fundamentally changing the view that travel time need be ‘dead time’.
Inline with this thinking a range of services, including at seat audio, a shop and complimentary magazines have been available since the service was launched. With shiny new Pendolino and Voyager trains now fully rolled out, the next step was to investigate the potential for onboard internet, movies and music.
A range of blue-sky creative workshops, run by Nunwood, provided the initial impetus for deciding what the building blocks of any new entertainment proposition could be. In consultation with Virgin Trains this thinking was then put though a ‘pragmatism filter’ – differentiating between what could be achieved in the short-/medium-term and what would represent longer term investments.
Working with the Virgin Team, the pertinent bits of the proposition were then quantified. Interviewing passengers and non-passengers alike (via PDA interviewing technology), initial reactions and preferences were gauged.
As part of this exercise, our Market Analytics team ran a form of consumer choice modelling – allowing a practical market simulation to be built and, crucially, the likely financial implications of different aspects of the service to be gauged.
As the project moves onto the technical trials stage, this foundation for planning provides Virgin Trains with the ability to not only create a completely customer-led service, but also predict market size and likely uptake for different entertainment propositions.
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