Tall orders: the pair making it big with train ticket upgrades

IAIN Griffin and his company co-founder Dirk Stewart have a combined height of 12ft 8in, which is a lot of body to fold into a small train seat.

- Lucy Tobin

 When they travelled together, as colleagues at a digital marketing agency, they became competitive at seeing who could blag an upgrade to first class by dodging guards and negotiating with ticket inspectors. It was on one such journey that the duo decided to see if they could turn their oneupmanship into a money-spinner.

Seatfrog, their £25 million-a-year rail upgrade and ticketing business, was the answer. Griffin’s background was in advertising, Stewart’s in tech. They were drawn to the scale of rail — “78,000 people get on and off a train in Europe every minute,” Griffin points out, as well it being a “massively under-digitised category. We saw the billions in missed revenue from the 570 million first-class seats that travel empty every year, and wanted to make upgrading lightning fast and affordable for everyone.”

The Seatfrog app allows customers to buy train tickets, switch previously inflexible tickets to a new time or day, and upgrade to first class either using a ‘buy it now” option, or — potentially far more cheaply — using an eBay-style auction 24 hours before departure, when leftover seats are sold off.