https://PasseTonBillet.fr
A platform to buy and sell unused train tickets
PasseTonBillet is a small startup based in France that I worked for on a voluntary basis during my penultimate year at St. Andrews. I initially got involved as I personally knew the other developer in the team, although recenltly I have had to put this commitment on hold temporarily due to other projects and my internship at Fidessa starting soon.
PasseTonBillet.fr is a web based platform that allows users to buy and sell unwanted or unused train tickets. Currently, we support several different train providers such as Eurostar, Thalys, Prems, SNCF, and others. Users on the site can still sell tickets from other providers, but if the purchase is from one ot the supported providers, the original e-ticket (pdf) will be automatically emailed to the buyer on completion of the payment. The payment is made directly to the seller, and currently we do not charge commission. However, we did recently introduce our first paid feature, a premium-rate phone call directly to the buyer, allowing you to secure your purchase instantly without having to message them first and potentially be outbid by others.
Theres not that many websites providing a similar service to PasseTonBillet. In the UK, reselling train tickets is strictly regulated, but it does depend on the type of ticket and whether you used an inermediary service ( such as trainline ) or not. Generally, reselling train tickets is illegal, as it contradicts the railways bye-laws (2005) 21.1 to 21.4. as tickets are non-transferrable. It is also a further offence to buy one from an unauthorised source.
The exact laws can vary a lot depending on the country and provider, and for international trains it is very unclear. There are some useful blog posts on the subject here and here. In a lot of cases, you could always sell somone a pen and throw in the tickets for free…
The main issue we have faced so far when developing the platform is scammers. We get a lot of users selling expired, invalid or counterfeit tickets, and often we find the same tickets listed on other sites as well. So, we have to put in to use several sophisticated security features and KYC authentication on sellers. This has proven to be pretty effective so far since customer reviews are generally positive and recently we have seen records of around 80 new user sign ups and 30 new tickets posted for sale a day. PasseTonBillet is implemented mainly in Laravel, Vue, and PostgreSQL.
