The leading global inventory, reservation,
and ticketing system for public transport

Module S3 Payment

S3 Payment is the component that deals with all outgoing interaction with a variety of Payment Service Providers. It abstracts the payment provider-specific logic and flows from the rest of the S3 Passenger landscape, and is therefore suitable for extension with any industry standards compliant payment service provider.

The module comes pre-integrated with a variety of providers, amongst which the market leaders such as Adyen and Worldpay. Operators that sign a contract with any of the pre-integrated providers, can simply configure and enable their payment interface without any additional development or integration cost.

S3 Payment, like the rest of the S3 Passenger landscape, is fully PCI DSS Level 1 compliant.

The complexity of payment lies primarily in the reverse flow: therefore S3 Payment comes with a rich feature set for automated refunding in self-service mode (dependent on the amount of support from the connected provider).

S3 Payment is an optional module in the landscape; when a middleware sales layer is in place between the customer facing front-end and S3 Passenger, payment integration can also take place there and S3 Ticket supports capturing a trusted record of payment from the sales system directly.

Module S3 Communication

S3 Communication is the module that handles all outgoing communication from the S3 Passenger platform to customers, passengers and potentially other external users.

Template management for emails and SMS messages is part of this module, but also the configuration and scheduling of other related outgoing messages from the S3 Passenger ecosystem. S3 Communication is tightly integrated with S3 Ticket for the communication aspects of ticket fulfilment and delivery.

At the heart of the module lies a programmatic template generation logic called “Freemarker”, in which the operator can define conditional logic and structures within each template. For example, instructions on luggage handling and bringing a bike on board, can be dynamically included in a confirmation email based on the presence of the corresponding add-on products.

S3 Communication includes a lightweight “CMS” module, in which often reused content can be managed that can even be retrieved with API calls towards external front-end websites and applications. This allows the operator to keep track of, for example, the relevant “Terms and Conditions” text in one central place and re-use it across all relevant channels.

Module S3 CRM

S3 CRM is the customer profile management module of the platform. S3 CRM is an optional module in the landscape; S3 Passenger can also integrate easily with an existing back-office enterprise CRM system. Usually, pages such as “MyTransportCompany” within the booking engine web channel are operated with support of the S3 CRM functions to sign up for an account, manage newsletter permissions, personal profiles and show the history of bookings created within that profile.

Module S3 Ticket

S3 Ticket is the transactional heart of the system containing all booking records and history. It ensures transactional consistency in a multi-channel environment and allows passengers to capture a provisional booking and be assured of their seat reservations while they complete their transaction. It internally manages the dependency of inventory availability in S3 Inventory, and controls the sophisticated process of after-sales including support for exchange, cancellation and refund, passenger name changes, seat change and more.

Where S3 Ticket really excels is when unexpected events occur: its conflict management features include the ability to automatically re-accommodate large numbers of passengers in a few clicks, compensate them with a voucher for delays, communicate proactively during disruptions, and much more.

S3 Passenger is compliant with the relevant international standards and relevant exchange protocols, such as the UIC 918.3 barcode standards and the recently published Open Sales and Distribution Model.

Module S3 Inventory

The “inventory management” part of S3 Passenger is entirely covered by S3 Inventory. Seamlessly integrated with S3 Navigator, S3 Inventory adds a scheduling layer of which physical equipment is used to execute which services in the timetable. From this, highly automated calculations of both the physical and logical availability are performed, leading to a wide range of powerful features as the foundation under a strong revenue management strategy including overbooking capabilities. S3 Passenger has been successfully integrated with all market-leading revenue management platforms.

S3 Inventory is entirely O&D based, leading to unrivalled precision when it comes to optimising seat capacity. The advanced seating algorithm picks the most suitable seats for any group of passengers in milliseconds, taking many relevant factors into account when it comes to passenger comfort and preferences, commercial strategy and vehicle load distribution.

S3 Passenger has a wide range of features available out of the box that allow operators to gain ancillary revenue from their seating strategy as well, including the ability to bind the availability of add-on products and services to seats with certain physical traits and the option to earn on surcharges for the ability to have customers pick their own seats.

Module S3 Fare

S3 Fare is the module used to define commercial market propositions including products, tariffs, discounts and various prices, for scheduled services.

A wide range of product types are supported, including “main” products (ticket with seat reservation, ticket without seat reservation, separate seat reservation) and “add-on” products (fees, insurances, food & beverages, pets, bicycles, prams, etc.). A detailed set of rules and conditions is available to create differentiated sets of Tariffs and Products per sales channel and portals.

Module S3 Navigator

S3 Navigator is the service scheduling module of the S3P platform which handles everything related to the configuration of timetables and of the geographical network including routes, stops and connections.

Once a network is defined, each service type and all timetables of scheduled services can be managed. In addition, the creation of exceptions on stop or service level can temporarily overrule the scheduled planning; a powerful function to manage operational incidents. This process will also lead to automatic conflict generation on bookings already captured in S3 Ticket for the involved services.

The powerful search engine within S3 Navigator can build and evaluate all possible itineraries in milliseconds and filter out less suitable options to present the best outcome to clients at a large scale. S3 Navigator can optionally be filled with external source data via APIs or GTFS import.