Passport to Shut Down Transit-Ticketing Business at Year’s End as It Focuses on Parking

U.S.-based Passport Labs confirmed that it will shut down its mobile transit-ticketing business and end all support for its ticketing platform at the end of this year, as it quietly exits the market segment.

A spokeswoman for the company, which continues as a large mobile-payments provider for parking in cities across the U.S. and beyond, told Mobility Payments that it informed its transit-ticketing clients of the end of support in October 2021. At the time, Passport said it would terminate all access to the platform, “including back-office reporting and supporting software,” and advised clients to “seek replacement transit solutions. 

“They were also notified that Passport would continue to work with remaining transit customers to address critical issues that may arise with their transit services through that date (Jan. 1, 2023), said the spokeswoman.

She didn’t say why Passport had decided to pull out of the market for transit ticketing, but one observer of the software-as-a-service ticketing market told Mobility Payments he thought Passport wanted to focus on its strong parking business and didn’t have a lot of clients for ticketing.

Passport has provided mobile transit ticketing to such large and mid-tier U.S. cities as Jacksonville, FL;  Charlotte, NC; Miami, FL; Tucson, AZ; Albuquerque, NM; Cleveland, OH; Sacramento, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Salt Lake City, UT; and Columbia, SC.

Transit agencies have had around 14 months to find another mobile-ticketing provider, and some of the Passport apps remain live. Another observer of the SaaS ticketing market said he had heard rumors of Passport planning to leave the market since late 2020. And the company hasn’t promoted its transit ticketing offer for a least a couple of years.

But Passport has never publicly announced the plans to leave the transit-ticketing market.  

As Mobility Payments reported this week, one of the Passport mobile ticketing  clients is the Utah Transit Authority in Salt Lake City, which has issued a request for proposal to find a new mobile-ticketing provider. It expects to approve a contract in late June. The agency also issued a separate RFP to overhaul the rest of its fare-collection system, including replacing validators on board its buses and rail platforms for closed- and open-loop cards and open-loop card credentials in NFC mobile wallets.

UTA said for the mobile-ticketing app, it plans to enable electronic verification of the digital tickets with 2D-barcode scanners. There will also be an option to accept closed-loop contactless and NFC devices. At present, the agency tells users of the Passport white-label GoRide app to show their tickets to bus drivers and other agency personnel for visual validation.

A consultant for UTA estimated the capital cost of the new mobile-ticketing service would be $2.1 million and that operations would cost $2 million for the ticketing vendor over 10 years.

Jacksonville, which launched its MyJTA app using Passport technology in late 2015, and Tucson and its GoTucson Transit app, appear to be among the cities that are still live with Passport. The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority is also live with its Passport-based RTA CLE app, but only for about another month.

The Cleveland agency’s board last month approved a $2.7 million contract with UK-based SaaS ticketing vendor Masabi to launch an upgraded app later next month. The contract includes purchase of validators for the agency’s transit vehicles.

A description of the current RTA CLE app from Passport said users should show their tickets to agency personnel for visual validation. A local Cleveland report said there were still nearly 20,000 unused passes on issue with the current app and that users could no longer purchase new passes after this month.

The new Cleveland app will be part of the regional EZfare ticketing service run by the Ohio-based NEORide group. It consists of 14 agencies in Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan, including SORTA, which serves Cincinnati. Users will be able to buy tickets in the trip-planning Transit app and also possibly through a local app.

Besides Masabi, Passport has competed with U.S.-based SaaS mobile-ticketing providers Bytemark, Token Transit and Cubic’s Umo platform.

Meanwhile, Passport is expected to continue to try to expand its parking app business.

The company is funded by venture capital and doesn’t release its revenue or profit and loss figures publicly.

In December 2019, it said it closed a $65 million series D funding round, including investments by Rho Capital Partners, HIG Growth Partners and ThornTree Capital Partners. The new investors joined existing Passport investors Bain Capital Ventures, MK Capital, Grotech Ventures, and Relevance Ventures, the company said. It added that the latest round brought total funding to $125 million.

Passport did not mention transit ticketing in the late 2019 announcement of the series D round. Instead, it said the new capital would be invested in expanding the company’s “mobility ecosystem to enable mobile pay parking outside of traditional parking apps.”

Recently, Passport said it was serving more than 800 cities, universities and agencies, including those in Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles and Miami. The vast majority are no doubt for parking.

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