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The BDZ Passenger Services Ltd. real-time ticketing and reservation system reported nearly 23 million tickets, and the total number of generated season tickets reached 465,000. The platform was developed by Information Services and put into operation in December 2017. It fully covers the specific business needs of the national railway carrier for domestic ticketing in Bulgaria. The system is implemented in 99 stations and offices in the entire country and covers all railway routes and over 600 trains.
The customers of the national railway carrier very actively use the online ticketing system. So far, over 140,000 tickets have been sold through the website https://bileti.bdz.bg and just in 2021 have been reported more than 82,000 online sales. The system allows to book a ticket at any time of the day, from any place in the world, also gives the opportunity to choose a seat or a sleeping berth for each train.
"The implementation of real-time ticketing and reservation system has significantly improved the quality of ticket reservation and booking services, the work of the national railway carrier`s staff and reduced misuses” the Information Services`CEO Ivaylo Filipov stated. According to him, the platform achieves better management and monitoring of sales and train scheduling, as well as the fill tracking of the seats. It replaced the old ticketing system used by the national railway carrier, which was based on MS DOS, with no cash register connectivity.
Information Services additionally implemented automatic real-time data input of the train schedule integration. This facilitates and significantly improves the operation of the system and eliminates the manual input needs.
In addition a functionality has been developed, which allows ticket issuance directly on the train by the conductor. It allows all the passengers who use railway stations without a ticket office to buy their ticket on site on the train. This happens through a mobile device connected via mobile network to the central server and a mobile printer. The new functionality is to be certified by both Bulgarian Institute of Metrology (BIM) and National Revenue Agency. Currently, the conductors are validating the tickets regularity through the mobile devices. Up to date, more than 750,000 tickets have been validated via the available mobile devices (PDAs).