The potential for integrating the seat reservation functionality into the Russian Railways passengers' mobile application

Railway transport is traditionally preferred when travelling between 400 and 1000 km. Depending on financial possibilities and personal idea of comfort, passengers choose different types of cars. Despite the fact that the passenger is familiarised with the conditions of travel in advance (at the time of ticket purchase), requests to change seats with fellow travellers are often noted at the moment of boarding, which complicates the work of the car conductor, provokes violation of the Rules of Passenger Transportation and causes discomfort to persons with whom the passenger wants to agree on such an exchange. Despite the de facto existence of the problem, the carrier does not have statistical data on passengers' perception of seat exchange requests. This paper examines the need to introduce an additional parameter in the menu of the mobile application "RZD to Passengers" to enable early legitimate seat exchange in purchased tickets with provision for compensation for the passenger who expresses consent to the exchange in the incoming request. As a methodology of the research a set of methods of analysis, synthesis, deduction and induction was used. The author proposes to improve the quality of passenger service of long-distance trains by preventive solution of the issue of seat exchange, thereby eliminating the probability of conflict situations during the journey and reducing the number of violations of the Rules of Passenger Transport. This article may be of practical interest to companies providing passenger transport services on long-distance trains (e.g. JSC FPC, TC Grand Service Express, LLC Tverskoy Express).