The Edinburgh operator has seen usage swell as a result of the city’s annual Festival
Lothian has for the first time recorded over 100,000 ‘taps’ in one day using its capped contactless payment method known as ‘TapTapCap.’ The contactless system, which Lothian introduced in 2019, reached the milestone for the first time on Friday 18 August, 14 days into the Edinburgh Festival season. Sarah Boyd, Managing Director at Lothian, said: “I’m thrilled that our TapTapCap system has reached this incredible milestone of over 100 thousand taps in just one day. Our buses continue to be a popular method of public transport for residents and visitors to our city during the Festival, and this achievement is testament to the amazing work of our people across the business during the extremely busy month of August. Our contactless payment system has been a real success story for Lothian since its introduction and we look forward to breaking even more records in the future.”
The system was supplied by Flowbird. David Thompson, Managing Director of Flowbird’s transport division in the UK, added: “It’s amazing to see that so many people at this year’s festival are taking advantage of the convenience of open payments and the benefits of fare capping. Not only does it remove the need to understand fares and carry cash, visitors have the freedom to explore the city safe in the knowledge that the fare system flexes with them. This is ideal for encouraging Edinburgh’s international and domestic visitors to use the bus network.”
The operator’s open payment method averages over 80k journey taps per day, and has logged over 5.4 million unique users in over four years of operation. In 2021, Lothian also introduced weekly capping as well as daily caps.
