I’ll offer you a perspective as a VAMOOZ operator (as well as a good friend of AH, for what‘ that’s worth.
Others have made the point very eloquently that success and failure are difficult to define. The bus industry often defines success in terms of territory - essentially a life-sized version of the board game ‘Risk’ - and something is only a success if there there’s lots of it and it is seen to expand. The reality is a lot more nuanced.
Over the last few years huge amounts of time and effort have been expended trying to find new models - other than the conventional fixed line bus route concept - that would expand the market for bus travel. Everyone involved recognises that it’s a hugely difficult space but that there’s something there worth exploring. You would expect an international group like Transdev to be as keen as anyone else to be in that space.
But as with many industries, so called R&D - research and development of new products - is a very distinct activity from every day business, so the criteria for success and failure will be far more subtle than just how much money it makes or how big it gets, and essentially will be a matter for the innovator to decide and no one else. Bluntly, they do it for their own reasons with their own money so they get to decide where the goalposts are.
For me, there is nothing wrong with the basic premise of VAMOOZ - the idea of crowdfunded bus services. Historically, one of the big problems of new service development has been that a bunch of people will say there is a demand; the bus operator won’t want to take the risk so there’s no way of proving either way. VAMOOZ creates a platform to break through that logjam: you float an idea, and if enough people sign up, it runs, and if they don’t, it doesn’t.
Like many R&D projects, you learn as you go, and while I don’t have inside knowledge, it seems to me that the VAMOOZ team pretty quickly realised that using it as a platform to stimulate demand for individual events/day trips etc was a pretty inefficient use of scarce resource and that the real value was in establishing home-to-school and home-to-work links that wouldn’t otherwise have found a way to exist. The fact that those links have been created, and survive, combined with the fact that VAMOOZ was a much cheaper platform to develop compared to many demand-based apps, suggests that it was a success.
We got involved at CT Plus because I was (and remain) keen to develop our Yorkshire business but we have generally had a very low commercial profile in the area. We had ideas for new links that we felt would be far more likely to attract support from non-traditional bus using communities if they were associated with a sexy looking app than with our own brand that most people probably wouldn’t be familiar with that mainly ran elderly double deckers on school runs.
It hasn’t really happened, partly because of time constraints and partly because we haven’t been able to bring those opportunities to fruition for other reasons. But given that the entire risk to us was the cost of painting one double decker, which is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, well frankly, so what!? We’re not actively pursuing any VAMOOZ projects at the moment but it still very much exists as a concept and one phone call tomorrow and we could be off and running!
I can’t speak for other operators who joined the platform - I’ve a feeling one or two of them thought something magical was going to happen without them putting any effort in, which is a bit unhelpful if true - but I know in some cases it has indirectly led to things that may not have VAMOOZ stamped on the side but probably wouldn’t have existed had it not been for that brand generating interest and opening doors.
Finally, the fact that the VAMOOZ project manager is now the Marketing Manager for Transdev as a whole, should give a pretty clear indication of how those within the business feel about the project!
So it’s impossible for anyone who wasn’t sat round the board table when the project was first conceived - I certainly wasn’t - to really know whether it’s a success or failure, but I guess my point is that innovation is about far more than just a short term return on investment and that a project like VAMOOZ has to be viewed with a great deal more subtlety and insight.
