Case Study: Wi-Fi enabled onboard Infotainment platform for Rhätische Bahn
The goal of the project was to increase the quality of on-board services and deliver innovative solution on famous mountain line Bernina Express trains operated by the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) – the largest Alpine railway in Switzerland.
These trains are taking passengers in panoramic coaches on breathtaking rides in amazing Swiss mountains.
RhB wanted to deliver new experience to passengers and know more about passengers demographic data for remarketing purposes. They wanted to give them travel related information about their journey, inform them about points of interest around, provide travel guides in a new interactive form. All on their personal devices.
The main challenges for solution were requirements for coach independent solution, weak GPS and GSM signals in the mountains, support for up to 7 languages and extended temperature range of operation.
As a solution, Passengera server+ was installed in every coach. A single device provides an all-in-one service including Wi-Fi for passengers, Internet connectivity over GSM for remote management and content updates with integrated GPS, and hosts a web based Infotainment platform. Passengers are using the service from their own devices without the need to install anything. They just connect to Wi-Fi, open the web browser and start exploring. They can find map with live GPS location of the train, route & schedule information, points of interest along the route with pop-up notifications based on train position and feed, movies and documentaries about Bernina Express, audio guides and souvenir shop, all with multilingual support. Passengers can sit down, look out the window, explore the countryside and the system automatically notifies them about approaching stations and points of interest. If interested, passengers just click play and the system will replay the related audio guides in their language.
On the other side RhB has many benefits with Passengera platform as well. They now have a new communication channel with passengers to inform them about news and related services, and a new business channel to promote additional services from the region to support growth of tourism. All trains are centrally managed from Passengera Cloud, marketing team can remotely update content data over the fleet without the need to visit the trains. Operational team can monitor fleet status, performance, and detailed statistics about connectivity, management and marketing teams can monitor user trends and behavior with their demographic data, see what interests passengers the most and take relevant decisions.
Beside RhB trains, Passengera has been implemented into one of the client's buses taking advantage of our support of onboard fixed screens (read more about the support of fixed screens in our previous blog post here). Thanks to our unified management system, RhB can easily manage the infotainment system on board of both trains and buses at the same time.
By introducing various innovative features, RhB were able to upgrade their service and raise customer experience to a higher level. Since its launch, Passengera solution has become popular among passengers and it’s planned to be implemented into more trains. RhB are now able to fully use the opportunities beyond the primary goal of taking passengers from one place to another.
Bernina Express with Passengera on board is the first mountain train service on the globe running such Infotainment platform on passengers devices.
“Before deploying Passengera, we knew little about our passengers. With Passengera on board, we now know their interests and demographic data, which we can use to better target new promotions.” – Michael Kistler, Head of Marketing Communications & E-business, RhB
The project was recently voted as Higly Commended at the SmartRail Europe Innovation Award (read about it in one of our previous blog posts here).
You can download the case study below.