Until now fragmented into a handful of distinct applications, the digital offer of the SNCF trades the imbroglio for the clarity. The railway company is today launching its unique "SNCF Connect" application. It replaces Oui.sncf and several other services hitherto dispersed.

SNCF is now deploying Connect, a unique application that should make our lives easier // Source: inkflo via Pixabay

It's official, SNCF is now deploying SNCF Connect. Announced at the very beginning of last year by Jean-Pierre Farandou, CEO of the SNCF group, this new single application aims to bring together services that have until now been spread over several separate applications.

SNCF Connect is now provided in the form of a simple update of the Oui.sncf application, and brings together a full range of functions: route search, purchase of train tickets, purchase bus tickets, car rental (via Avis), booking taxis or carpooling, grouping several tickets for a single journey, traveler information, but also the management of refunds, cancellations and various complaints.

Farewell OUI.sncf, we won't regret you...

"The idea is to be able to do everything in a single gesture, to launch searches in natural language and to enrich the offer with more than 170 features and 4,000 passenger scenarios compared to 800 for Oui.sncf", comments in particular Benoît Bouffart, Product & Tech Director for SNCF Connect, quoted by BFM Business.

Source: Frandroid

However, the application still neglects a few functions. For example, it is impossible to find offers from competing operators on certain main lines on SCNF Connect. One thinks in particular of the axis Paris-Lyon-Milan, proposed for a few months by the Italian Trenitalia. In a more temporary way, it is also impossible, for the moment, to reserve bicycles, scooters or buses for urban travel.

It is also impossible at this stage to find certain competing TER offers, but the SNCF promises that they will be gradually integrated. It is necessary: ​​these competing trains should become more and more common at the regional level, recently underlined La Croix.

Source: SNCF

An AI layer… to take advantage of the mass of SNCF data

With SNCF Connect, the objective is also to make more efficient use of the mass of data collected every day by SNCF. To do this, the company relies on AI, which powers part of its new application to offer more relevant information, but also sharper features to the end user.

"In concrete terms, when we have a million route requests per day, we are able to offer a lot of things to the user in terms of the relevance of journeys, associated offers, all fed by artificial intelligence" explains Benoît Bouffart “The app will be able to make gestures on behalf of the customer: 20% of the functions will be motorized, such as the automatic addition of a free discount card, for example”.

So many new features that allow SNCF to modernize its digital offer. With SNCF Connect, the railway group also wants to make a good impression by betting on energy sobriety from the start of this new platform. The application natively uses a dark mode (more energy efficient) and we learn that it is cut off when not in use. Same approach for the back office, underlines BFM. The latter is powered by the Amazon cloud (AWS) to gain flexibility compared to the internal infrastructures used until now: the latter had to operate constantly at full speed.

The SNCF Connect application is available today on iOS and Android, it can also be found in a web version at this address.

SNCF Connect

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