Unicard have launched an innovative new product that allows local authorities to improve their tracking of home-to-school transport services.

Home-to-School is an extension for Unicard’s market-leading HOPS and Customer Management System (CMS).

The new product is designed to improve both the tracking and auditability of home-to-school travel via smart ticketing, and to provide in-depth data on the usage of such services and their capacity. 

Home-to-school travel can be particularly complex, and costly, for local authorities to implement when compared with other types of travel due to several factors:

• The number of children that are eligible for concessionary travel looks set to rise as the cost of living increases and more families become eligible for support.
• Children with special educational needs often have to be provided with separate bus services.
• Covid has led to an increase in the number of parents working from home some or all of the time, which means school transport services must be flexible enough to respond to changing demand.

Unicard’s solution offers the ability to easily blend transport that is delivered via tendered services (such as coaches, minibuses, or taxis) with existing public transport provision in a single ticketing and reporting platform.

It integrates seamlessly with an existing Unicard HOPS and CMS smart ticketing solution, providing a real-time view of actual home-to-school transport usage, making it easier for local authorities to see where efficiencies can be made in procurement. This means Unicard can also offer the public transport expertise that other home-to-school transport solutions do not have.

If you're part of a Local Authority looking to find out more about optimising home-to-school travel with our new product, or simply interested in what we have to offer, get in touch at the link below. We will also be demonstrating the new product at our stand at the Transport Ticketing Global event at Olympia London on June 28-29, 2022.