To coincide with the French Open tennis tournament, TGV Lyria has renewed its partnership with the Swiss player Stan Wawrinka. Two trains running between France and Switzerland bear the effigy of this native of Lausanne. " Through tennis, ice hockey and athletics, major sporting events that reflect the values we wish to convey, TGV Lyria aims to make up for its lack of brand awareness" said Andreas Bergmann, the railway company's CEO, who we met this week in the aisles of the Roland Garros.
Good news, with a 20% growth in ParisGeneva in the first quarter of 2017, traffic is back on track after a "disappointing" 2016 complicated The attacks in France have had a "negative impact" on the tourism sector. " The image of Paris was not conducive to travel among Swiss and international customers, particularly Chinese. We carried 5.2 million people, which represented a fall of 6%, but a much better result compared with other carriers and tourism professionals." he adds. And within this volume, business travellers have done better than resist, with 30% of total traffic and even 50% on the Paris-Geneva route.
Imagining the future of TGV Lyria
Considering however that " the best communication tool is the product itself" TGV Lyria will be working on a an in-depth overhaul of its offering. The project will be presented in September, but Andreas Bergmann gave us the broad outline between two winning returns from 'Stan'. The first commitment is to simplifying customer relations via digital and a useful and effective" mobile application which will enable business travellers to modify and upgrade their tickets from the end of 2017. The second, heavier and more costly project will be the modernisation of the fleet, with the introduction of larger capacity TGV Duplex trains within the next three years. The last point will be to improve the content of the service, with more varied and refined catering in the very near future. A call for tenders is underway. " Our satisfaction rate has reached 92%, but we still have a number of issues to resolve in order to meet certain customer expectations." . Finally, the return of trade fairs to Swiss stations (the latter having recently been closed by SBB) is envisaged in the same timeframe, alone or with a partner in order to ensure its economic viability.
On the back of this transformation project, the challenge for the corporate sales teams will be to convert more business travellers so that TGV Lyria becomes the essential carrier between France and Switzerland. " While we have taken the lead on the 3h and 3h30 routes, we need to increase our market share on the 4h routes such as Paris-Zurich." points out Andreas Bergmann. TGV Lyria's aim is to remind companies of its many advantages, such as centre-to-centre travel, on-board comfort, reduced journey times due to the absence of load breaks, not forgetting the environmental aspect with lower CO2 emissions compared to air and car travel. Will this communication take place tomorrow under the sole name of Lyria as part of theSNCF abandons the TGV name ? Find out in the coming months...
