After years of negotiations between Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) and Apple, it finally became possible, Tuesday May 21, to take the Paris metro or the RER by validating your transport ticket with your iPhone or Apple Watch, without physical map. Parisian transport customers have been waiting for many months for this functionality, already available on phones other than iPhones since October 2022.
Tickets can be purchased on the IDFM application, the transport authority for the Ile-de-France region, or on the Cartes application. “It’s been five years that the people of Ile-de-France have been waiting for it”rejoiced the president of the Ile-de-France Mobilités transport authority, Valérie Pécresse, during the presentation of the system.
Travelers holding a dematerialized transport card can recharge their Navigo pass or buy tickets without having to go through the transport ticket distribution terminals, where queues sometimes lengthen excessively in the major Parisian stations or the airports.
Validation by credit card is not considered
For the moment, however, only Navigo day, week and month passes as well as T + tickets are available. It therefore remains impossible to load one-off journeys outside the metro zone (covered by the T + ticket) onto these dematerialized cards, such as a ticket between Roissy – Charles-de-Gaulle airport and Paris, unless you take a Navigo day pass for all zones at 20.10 euros (compared to 11.80 euros for a single ticket).
Loading tickets allowing you to take the RER or suburban trains anywhere in Ile-de-France will only be available at the beginning of 2025, according to IDFM. Since 2021, it has been possible to purchase and then load a subscription or a single ticket onto a Navigo card (plastic) without going through the machines in the stations. But the Navigo card remained mandatory when passing through the gates.
The new service was initially expected to be available in early 2024, but the device ultimately “requested additional technological development”, explained IDFM at the beginning of April. Apple restricts the use of NFC technology, which allows the phone to communicate with validation terminals upon contact.
In five years, 22 million transport ticket purchases were made directly from smartphones, reports IDFM, the majority (61%) by iPhone users. Validation by bank card is not currently considered by Ile-de-France Mobilités, which prefers to concentrate on dematerialized titles.