Irish Rail

Iarnród Éireann, Irish Rail, operates city and commuter services in Dublin and Cork as well as intercity services throughout Ireland. Customers are at the heart of their business. Their mission is to deliver transport service that continuously meet customers’ requirements and help drive Irelands’ economic development.  This transport service is powered by S3 Passenger (S3P) since April 2017.

Irish Rail selected the S3P system in 2015 to replace their entire national reservation, pricing, ticketing and distribution system as part of the Irish Rail ‘Customer First’ programme. Sqills has been teaming up with Cubic Transportation Systems, Irish Rail’s prime contractor.

The Customer First programme consolidates a series of technology initiatives which will transform the way Irish Rail transacts and interacts with customers now and in the years to come. This includes strong yield management matching supply and demand and enhanced seat reservation capabilities, powered by S3P.

S3P handles multi-segment and multi-stopover passenger transport services, with or without reservation including sales of additional on-board services and after-sales operations of previously created bookings.

Irish Rail is immediately benefiting from S3 Passenger’s proven technology during the first days of operation, with improved customer experiences and record online revenue generation! S3 Passenger and Sqills have lived up to our expectations, especially their ‘can do’ mentality.

Gerry Culligan - Commercial Director Irish Rail

Sqills and a system integrator delivering S3P, how did we do it

Since 2015, Sqills and Cubic have provided IT products and services to Irish Rail, including service design, service transition and service operations. Cubic, as prime contractor, has the overall responsibility for the service delivery since Go Live, whereas Sqills provides only third line support to Cubic.

Some special characteristics of the implementation project include:

  • offering open and reserved ticketing
  • booking office functionality and conductor tooling offering sales and validation functionalities powered by S3P.

Sqills considers having direct access and an open dialogue with Irish Rail crucial for the succes of both companies and the ongoing innovation of the S3P suite.

March 2021 – the move to AWS

S3P was hosted on premises since 2015 by Cubic in their UK data centers. In 2020 Irish Rail, Cubic and Sqills agreed on a migration project to upgrade S3P to the latest version in the AWS cloud managed by Sqills (SaaS version). Irish Rail will benefit from all features and technical improvements added to the system in the last 4 years. You can read more about the project here.

Are you interested to learn more about Irish Rails Customer First programme and how we replaced the dated legacy systems of Irish Rail? Contact us!

Journey Planner Irish Rail