The SNCF plans to launch the split payment service at the end of the year to help the most modest to take tickets by staggering their purchase over time. Today, for a family, which reserves train tickets for the holidays, it can quickly become expensive.
You have to be able to pay, all at once, several hundred euros, months before departure. Not all households have the means to do so, sometimes that’s even why they prefer to take the car. With this new device, travelers will therefore be able to pay in several instalments.
Lastminute or Lidl Voyages already do this, and it works very well. At Lidl, split payment represents a quarter of transactions, at Cdiscount Voyages, half of stays. SNCF hopes to attract new customers. And to technically deploy this split payment system, the company is currently looking for a partner. But before announcing it, she wants to be sure that the application will work, especially since she is already faced with repeated bugs in her S application.NCF Connect. However, the latter had to simplify reservations and payments!
But three weeks following the launch of SNCF Connect, there are still a lot of problems with readability, reservations, QR codes that don’t work. SNCF CEO Jean-Pierre Farandou had to explain himself and promised improvements by the end of March. But Sunday, February 13, Jean-Baptiste Djébarri, the Minister of Transport asked him to speed up and resolve the malfunctions as quickly as possible.
Construction sites on the rails while the SNCF faces competition. On the TER but also the TGV lines, new players are arriving. They cut prices, offer better services, like Trenitalia which since mid-December serves the Paris – Lyon link.
In addition, economically, the SNCF is very weakened by the pandemic: three billion euros in losses, in 2020 alone. And last year, because of health restrictions, it did not regain its level of before the Covid-19 crisis. Telecommuting causes him to lose business customers, the ones who pay the most. Last week, Jean-Pierre Farandou called on the State for help…. and presidential candidates. He asked for more resources to rapidly advance rail in France.