m-tickets

You can purchase a range of Single and Day tickets (including discounted bundles of Day Tickets) for use on Lothian Buses, EastCoastbuses, Airlink, Skylink, Lothian Country, or Edinburgh Trams.

You can also purchase Single and Return Tickets to/from Edinburgh Airport for use on our Airlink and Skylink services, or on Edinburgh Trams.

There is a minimum purchase price of £4 per transaction, however, you can pick and mix any combination of tickets in your basket in order to reach this.

Once purchased and downloaded, your tickets will appear as “purchased” under “My Tickets” in your app. When you want to use one, tap on the ticket you want (they are listed from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom) and then tap “activate now” – you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to activate this ticket.

When a ticket is “activated”, the app will generate an animated ticket on your smartphone screen – you should show this to the driver upon boarding who needs to check our special security features to ensure that the ticket is genuine. Part of the ticket shows the current date and time and this will be checked our staff, so make sure your phone has the correct time and date before you activate any tickets (most do this automatically, if set to the UK timezone).

Once you activate an m-ticket, you’ll have five minutes (for SINGLEtickets) or until the end of day services (for DAYtickets) to use the m-ticket before it expires. LATEtickets and NIGHTtickets expire at around 4.30am. If you’re using SINGLEtickets, you should activate it just before you board the bus.

When you buy an m-ticket, you have up to 180 days from purchase to activate and use it.

Our m-ticket app isn’t designed for use on tablets.

You do need an active internet connection (either mobile data or Wi-Fi) to purchase m-tickets and download them to the app but once purchased, they can be activated “offline” without the need for an active internet connection. The app does need to “check-in” with our servers periodically, and you will receive a warning message if the app has been opened many times or over a long period without doing this. You can reset this by opening the app when you have a good mobile data or Wi-Fi connection. If you continue to use the app without a connection after receiving a warning message, the app may block further use until it has had the opportunity to check in.

No. In order to ensure that m-tickets can be easily and quickly verified by our drivers, active tickets are valid for one person per device only (unless you have activated a Family DAYticket, which is valid for up to two adults and up to three children).

If you want to use m-tickets for several people, you can buy them all on one device and use the “Share Tickets” to send tickets to each person who needs them, providing they have the m-ticket app installed on their own Smartphone.

“Share Tickets” allows you to send one or more of the tickets in your account to somebody else to use instead.

Simply tap “Share Tickets” to be taken to a page listing all your available tickets, and toggle the tickets you want to send. After hitting confirm, your tickets will be immediately transferred out of your account. You can then tap the “share” button on the confirmation page to choose how you want to send the sharing link – email, Bluetooth, NFC it’s up to you! Once your recipient has received the sharing link, they simply need to open it on their device with the m-tickets app installed to claim their tickets.

Each share link can only be used once, so if you send the same link to multiple recipients, the tickets will be transferred to whoever uses the link first. Both you and the recipient will need a good Wi-Fi or cellular data connection to be able to share tickets. An individual ticket can only be sent to another user once – that ticket cannot then be sent to someone else again once it has been claimed.

Please note that discounted bundles of tickets cannot be shared.

In order that the ticket can be securely activated offline, m-tickets are locked to the smartphone on which they are purchased. If you’ve got a new phone or have had to perform a factory reset, you can request a transfer of your tickets – simply login to the m-tickets app as usual on your new/reset device and open “my tickets”, before following the in-app prompts.

Transfers are not immediate as they will be authorised and processed during business hours (Monday-Friday, 08:30-17:00). You will receive an email confirming that your transfer has been completed.

In-app transfers can be requested once every 6 months, should you need a further transfer please or if you encounter any problems please contact us by emailing [email protected].

Show the bus driver the expired ticket which will clearly show how long ago the m-ticket expired. If the driver decides that the m-ticket is invalid, you will need to activate another m-ticket, or buy a ticket from the bus driver.

SINGLEtickets will expire after 5 minutes – you can show the inspector the expired ticket by navigating to “expired” under “my tickets” within the app. Other ticket types should still be active and should be shown to the inspector or TSA in the same way you showed your ticket to the driver upon boarding.

It is your responsibility to ensure that your smartphone has enough battery power to be able to display a valid m-ticket to the driver or TSA and, subsequently, any TfE official throughout your journey.  If you cannot do this, you will need to pay for a ticket from the driver or, on Edinburgh Trams, pay the Standard Fare.

If you’re using a tram Single Ticket, you will need to activate it before boarding the tram by scanning the QR code located on every tram stop shelter. Your ticket will be valid for 30 minutes from activation and should be shown to the TSA on board the tram.

If you’re using a DAYticket or LATEticket, make sure you activate the ticket before boarding your first bus or tram of the day and simply show the activated ticket to the TSA on board the tram.

If you board a tram without an activated m-ticket, you will have to pay the Standard Fare, which is currently £10.

You can send us an email to [email protected]. Please make sure you include a full description of the problem you’ve encountered, along with a note of the email address and telephone number your account is registered to.