Deriving new business models for door-to-door mobility

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Today, it is a widely shared objective to provide seamless door-to-door multimodal mobility for passengers. This is a key priority for SNCF, France’s historical national rail group. Despite many technological improvements, continuity of service is not guaranteed and travelers still endure high transaction costs through having to deal with multiple providers. In this paper we investigated what could be a business model for a door-to-door mobility operator who would take care of the traveler’s intermodal door-to-door journey. We showed that the door-to-door concept responds to various objectives and encompasses a variety of demand functions. The principal function of door-to-door is to make it possible to make a journey from A to B using a sequence of transportation modes. Examples of existing door-to-door business models depict different ways of positioning oneself in the value network. From selected case studies, we derived three contrasting business models which operate on the principle of platform mediated markets, namely the integrated, the platform and the network distributed model. They reflect distinct firm’s attitude towards adaptation to innovation. We show that involving local players allows increasing the end user surplus and that platform openness is a condition of success.