The JUNIOR & Cie service offered by SNCF is a special service for parents who are unable to accompany their children on an upcoming train trip. By using the J&CO travel services in JUNIOR & Cie travel, children between ages 4 and 14 travel in the care of a trained service professional. This SNCF service is now also powered by Sqills’ powerful S3 Passenger inventory, reservation and ticketing software.
How JUNIOR & Cie works
The JUNIOR & Cie service is straightforward:
- A service professional is responsible for taking the child from the departing station all the way to the JUNIOR & Cie pick-up point in the destination station;
- The service professional makes sure that the child is comfortable aboard the train, offering fun, engaging activities throughout;
- The service professional makes sure that the child is delivered to the designated person at the destination station.
New challenges – same product
One of the initial challenges of implementing S3 Passenger for the JUNIOR & Cie service was the fact that adult passengers need to be involved in the booking process, without actually travelling. S3 Passenger enables the registration of both the child traveling, as well as their parent(s), in the reservation.
The specific needs of both the client and the project not only made the project interesting but also highlighted the flexibility of S3 Passenger. Our ability to adapt to specific customer wishes without broad changes shows just how complete the software is right out of the box.
It is important to be able to reach the parent if necessary, and that they get onto the platform to drop off or collect their child(ren). Fortunately, S3 Passenger is flexible enough that it was possible to generate new QR-Codes that contain different information for each rail operator. This opened a wide range of options when it comes to booking selections.
With traditional operators, it is not possible for customers to select children’s rates when booking a ticket without the presence of an accompanying adult. With JUNIOR & Cie, children make up their entire customer base, without any adults traveling. This meant that it needed to be possible to select children’s rates without having to book an adult on the same trip. This atypical configuration was easy to realise with S3 Passenger.
What is exciting for the Sqills team about the JUNIOR & Cie implementation, is that it proves that the S3 Passenger product is flexible enough to cope with truly any type of passenger transport undertaking: at JUNIOR & Cie the volumes are small and the configuration is rather unorthodox to say the least due to the special nature of the services provided, but the project was brought live based on configuration efforts only, without custom built shortcuts or code hacks.
It is a nice illustration of the potential of a product with nearly unlimited configuration flexibility, adding a lot of value to the customer for which a smooth organisation of this service has a high strategic commercial value to promote train travel for a young generation!
