Since August 9, the health pass is compulsory for traveling by TGV or Intercités train. How to control between 300,000 and 500,000 travelers per day without causing long queues on the platforms or at the stations? Its verification represents a major logistical challenge for SNCF. To streamline controls, the railway company has set up an online platform called “Prêt à Voyager”. Experienced this summer, it has since been generalized to all TGV Inoui and OUIGO, as for the Intercités trains. But not to Thalys and Eurostar international trains, which have their own control systems.
“Two days before departure, all TGV Inoui, OUIGO, Ice and Intercity trains customers receive an SMS and an email inviting them to go to the platform, explains Laurence Pichard, the program manager for
Prêt à Voyager.
.
They download their ticket and their health pass there.
If it is valid, the mention
validated health pass
is placed above the QR code of the ticket.
»When the traveler scans his ticket on the automatic gates of the stations, a luminous symbol lights up in green above the door when it opens.
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“If this lights up orange, it means that no sanitary pass has been associated.
In red, it is that the check did not work and the customer is then invited to show his pass, notes Alain Krakovitch, general manager of Voyages SNCF.
The aim is to streamline controls.
If, in the future, everyone uses
Prêt à Voyager
, we no longer need to control sanitary passes in advance.
Clearly, the end of the first queue dedicated to the verification of passes by the blue vests, service providers for the SNCF.
Only the second will remain: that of ticket control at the automatic gates.
Additional checks in the run-up to vacation departures
Except that we are still far from it.
To date, 50,000 customers per week, or only around 1%, use “Prêt à Voyager”.
“The objective is to gain momentum quickly,” underlines Alain Krakovitch.
Even if he is a regular on the train or holder of a reduction card, the traveler will have to do the same thing on each trip.
"We cannot store personal data, we destroy them each time," notes Christophe Fanichet, CEO of SNCF Voyageurs.
So far, only around 50,000 customers use the “Ready to Travel” platform every week.
LP / Delphine Goldsztejn
With its “Ready2Fly” system, Air France was subject to the same constraints. The difference between the SNCF system and that of the airline company lies in its automation. "We have obtained the authorizations of the national printing press and the general direction of health to set up our own system of verification, immediate and automatic, argues Alain Krakovitch. There is no human agent, as at Air France, who checks files one by one with the TousAntiCovid Verif app. It was impossible with our volumes. There, it hardly takes a few seconds. "
Ultimately, if the craze is there, this will allow SNCF to redeploy its blue vests in order to carry out more checks.
“This morning, it took thirty-two minutes for five control officers to check the sanitary passes of an OUIGO with 1165 seats,” recalls Christophe Fanichet.
Up to now, one in four trains has been checked.
We are going to switch to one in three trains from next week for major departures.
"In September, the CEO of the SNCF group, Jean-Pierre Farandou, estimated the cost of these controls at" several million euros "and the overall cost of health measures linked to the Covid crisis at" nearly a hundred million euros ”, including 60 million euros dedicated to train disinfection.
