SNCF is France's national state-owned railway company operating France's high-speed rail network and regional passenger railway services. Every day SNCF transports more than five million passengers across their 15,000 commercial trains.

SNCF operates almost all of France's railway traffic. It is the second largest railway company in Europe and one of the largest in the world.

As the leading transport operator in France, SNCF’s goal is to drive seamless, sustainable passenger transport and create the mobility of tomorrow. To do so, SNCF needed a reservation system capable of replacing their resilient but almost 30-year-old reservation system. They also needed a solution that was future proof and could adapt to their needs.

A project and operator of a massive scale

SNCF selected S3 Passenger in 2021 to replace their high-speed train inventory, reservation and pricing system. The introduction of S3 Passenger was at the heart of a transformation of SNCF’s commercial IT ecosystem that also included a revenue management solution and new solutions for stations to sell B2C tickets.

With more than 100 million passengers per year and a network that covers 28,000 km of line serving every part of France, the transactional volume involved with SNCF was a first for Sqills. This meant both infrastructure and performance had to be optimised during the implementation project to facilitate this increased demand.

Improving the overall yield with the Sqills Pricing Engine

One of the primary motivators for SNCF to switch to S3 Passenger was the fact that their reservation system was inflexible, meaning SNCF could not easily adapt to supply and demand. Sqills provides a solution that empowers SNCF to dynamically shape their pricing strategies with unprecedented flexibility and precision - a solution that came in the form of the S3 Pricing Engine. While it was already in development, working alongside SNCF offered new insights and sped up the development process remarkably.

Thanks to the capabilities of the Pricing Engine, SNCF benefits from fares adapting seamlessly to its evolving business needs.

The Pricing Engine was built from scratch during the project, and it is now one of the sought after features of S3 Passenger. One of the unique aspects of S3 Passenger is that all customers use the exact same software product, despite operators being very different in their business model and operation. This means all operators that use S3 Passenger can now benefit from the functionality of the Pricing Engine.

A partnership from start to go live

The actual implementation of S3 Passenger was done by the SNCF team, but the entire project was a true partnership from start to finish. Sqills was there to share previous experiences and support SNCF. This included help from the high-level design phase through to operations. It was a relationship built on trust that focused on delivering the best possible results and solving any challenges that might arise during the project. This made all parties involved feel like one big team working together.

Powering the 2024 Olympic Games

After the initial go live on September 26th, 2023, there was another milestone that many major public passenger transport operators will possibly only experience once in a lifetime - powering the Olympic Games. An event where approximately 13,5 million visitors were expected.

SNCF played a crucial role in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris and facilitated everything that ranged from providing passenger information in their stations to transporting athletes and travellers to venues across France.

The prestige and draw of the event were evident, leading to the largest sales opening SNCF ever experienced. Despite selling around a million tickets during the sales opening, S3 Passenger made sure passengers were able to get the tickets they needed without issue. This proved both SNCF and Sqills were ready for the future, even during extraordinary times.