At 23, Alfie Willis has built a National Rail-accredited train ticket app after discovering that millions of rail passengers may be paying more than they need to.
While studying Business Economics at the University of Exeter, Alfie regularly heard his father talk about the realities of travelling by train for work.
Like many commuters, he was frustrated by the frequent delays, cancellations and subsequently the required time and effort to claim Delay Repay compensation.
His father felt the process was unnecessarily complicated, the eligibility rules were unclear, and most apps offered little to no help navigating it.
Those conversations stayed with Alfie and mirrored his own experiences travelling by rail. As a result, driven by a conviction that the experience could be meaningfully improved, he began building Choo Choo.
It was only as he started researching the industry that a second problem came into focus. Alfie discovered that train booking apps did not actually need to charge booking fees.
Commission was already built into the fare structure by the industry itself, meaning every pound charged as a booking fee was simply being extracted from passengers for no reason.
He also found that while some of the larger apps offered split ticketing, none of them optimised it fully. Cheaper combinations were being left on the table, meaning millions of passengers were overpaying; not because the savings didn’t exist, but because no one had built the tool to find them properly.
Alfie knew he and his father were not alone, but the scale of the problem still surprised him. What started as a personal frustration had become something larger. Rather than seeing the rail industry as too established or too complicated to change, he saw a clear opportunity.
“Our goal is to make train travel cheaper, and find our passengers savings they would otherwise miss,” he told BusinessCloud
“Choo Choo started out of a frustration my dad and I had. We always seemed to be on delayed trains, and it wasn’t clear when we could claim delay compensation.”
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From the outset, Alfie’s approach was deliberate. He did not want to build a generic travel app that did everything passably. He wanted to build one that sold train tickets better than anyone else, with a specific and uncompromising focus on three things: no booking fees, genuinely optimised split ticketing, and a Delay Repay experience that actually worked for passengers.
Building the business was not straightforward. The rail industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the UK, with major brands already serving millions of customers. Launching a new platform required not only technical development but a thorough understanding of the National Rail network, ticketing systems, and passenger rights.
In August 2025, Choo Choo launched as a National Rail-accredited train ticket app. The platform allows passengers to search and book tickets across the full National Rail network, identify split-ticket opportunities that other apps miss, and receive alerts when they may be eligible for Delay Repay compensation. Early adoption suggested there was genuine demand for a different approach.
Within months of launch, the app surpassed 10,000 downloads and continued to grow through customer recommendations and ongoing product development. By the time Choo Choo had processed £200,000 worth of tickets, it had saved customers over £25,000 through split ticketing and a further £5,000 by not charging booking fees.