Thetrainline Punches Ticket with Digital Element's Geolocation Solution

ATLANTA, Feb. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Element, the leading provider of IP Intelligence and geolocation solutions, today announced thetrainline, the UK's leading independent retailer of train tickets online, has chosen its NetAcuity® technology to comply with new license requirements from transportation regulators, and will also be leveraging the technology to deliver more targeted, city-level travel offers to its online rail customers.

Since 1999, thetrainline has sold train tickets to 3.3 million travelers, producing more than 14 million transactions among its 8.4 million plus registered users. The company sells tickets for all train companies on all UK national routes, with access to more than 293 million fare and journey combinations. In mid-2010, the company launched a new website with improved features and designs to make it even easier and quicker for travelers to buy inexpensive train tickets.

Initially, thetrainline will use NetAcuity to identify the likely country from which a booking is made.

"We had a new license requirement from our regulators that required us to identify bookings made from outside of the UK," said Richard Rowson, Product Development Director, thetrainline. "They required us to look at factors including IP address and country of issue for the debit or credit card used for payment. Based on these types of compliance needs, it was extremely important that we have a geolocation technology in place that was extremely reliable and accurate."

Independently verified to be more than 99.99 percent accurate at a country level and 95 percent accurate at a city level worldwide, Digital Element's IP Intelligence and geotargeting technology provides information such as geographic location (country, region, state, city and postcode), connection type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), proxy information, and more, based solely on IP address.

"Thetrainline undertook a competitive selection process, primarily evaluating the quality of our data, ease of integration, flexibility of licensing terms and cost," said Frank Bobo, Vice President, Digital Element. "Thetrainline's compliance needs dictated the selection of a company that offered the highest quality of data, and one that is committed to improving its accuracy levels through ongoing validation and certification reviews. The versatility of NetAcuity also appealed to them in that they could apply the technology in localized marketing and communications."

According to Rowson, the online ticket retailer plans to use Digital Element's data to deliver targeted, city-level offers on the website so that customers will see travel offers for train journeys most relevant to where they appear to be located. "We see this as the most interesting and valuable application of the technology because we will be able to drive more relevant on-site messaging and advertising," said Rowson.  

About Digital Element

Digital Element delivers the de facto standard in IP Intelligence, providing coverage for 99.9999 percent of the Internet and collecting more than one million points-of-view daily from different online vantage points. Taking advantage of its patented technology and a team of dedicated data analysts, most of the world's largest networks, websites, video portals and social networks, access the most comprehensive set of IP data available to deliver targeting advertising, content localization, geographic rights management, video streaming localization and analytics. Through Digital Element's industry vision and leadership, this non-invasive technology has evolved into much more than geographic information and now includes other intelligence factors such as connection speed, domain name, ISP and language.

For more information on how to uncover new levels of insight about online users, please visit www.digitalelement.com. Digital Element is a business unit of Digital Envoy.

About thetrainline.com

Thetrainline.com is the leading UK rail ticket retailer and rail ticket information provider, offering fast and easy access to timetables, fares, reservations and tickets through its Internet site and contact centre operations in the UK train travel sector.  In addition to its own website, www.thetrainline.com, it operates retail websites for many of the Train Operating Companies who sell rail tickets online, as well as providing a rail business travel service direct to a number of blue chip corporations and travel agents.

SOURCE Digital Element