Unic: New website for the Rhaetian Railway

Rail travelers now benefit from a modern, responsive booking platform with detailed route information, images and videos. Tickets for travel on Switzerland's largest Alpine railroad can now also be booked via mobile devices.

Rediscover the Rhaetian Railway digitally

With over ten million customers a year, the Rhaetian Railway is Switzerland's largest Alpine railroad. Now the company is setting new standards with Rhb.ch new standards: Travelers benefit from the modern, user-friendly booking and information platform, which considerably simplifies the booking process and thus gets them to their destination even faster. The relaunch gives the rail company a far-reaching competitive edge in the market. With the multilingual orientation of the website, long-distance markets such as China and Japan are also taken into account.

True to the guiding principle "Fascinatingly different on the road", the RhB's unique routes are now also becoming a digital experience. With the new website, RhB is pursuing a completely new goal: moving away from a simple corporate presentation to an emotional and individualized travel experience. "With our new website, we offer our customers completely new ways to discover the fascinating Alpine landscape. Trip planning is now an emotional, intuitive and varied process - all on one platform," explains Reto Schmid, Head of Marketing Communications & E-Business at RhB. "The new website meets the latest market requirements, addresses a larger target group and is designed to increase the attractiveness of the Rhaetian Railway."

The highlights of the new website

The new concept aims to inspire customers through images, videos, and an experience map and thus involve them more in the decision-making and booking process. For example, customers can use a Customized Google Map to virtually track the booked travel route and at the same time also see leisure activities in the region. This gives travelers a whole new feature to help them plan their trip and provide a diverse range of offers. The entire website is responsive. The continuously increasing number of mobile accesses made it essential to develop a content concept and a responsive website, through which the customer can get inspired and process the ticket booking. In addition to rail tickets and seat reservations, thanks to the use of Transport.opendata.ch, travel from a Swiss train station can also be handled via Rhb.ch can be planned and booked with the online timetable. By means of intelligent data evaluation, targeted marketing measures can also be carried out following the booking in order to increase customer loyalty.

Another highlight of the new platform is the ticker for the current operating situation - this informs travelers about disruptions and roadworks, thus giving customers the opportunity to reschedule their trip. "We have many more ideas, such as the introduction of e-mail tickets that customers do not have to print out for their trip. We will develop and implement these together with Unic," says Reto Schmid.

In the public tender for the project, Unic was awarded the contract and took on the challenge. In collaboration with RhB, Unic developed the modern website concept. In consulting, conception, design, implementation, digital analysis as well as hosting and operation, Unic applied its wide-ranging expertise and provides RhB with a competitive, contemporary booking platform that attracts new customers, builds long-term loyalty and increases online sales. The Responsive Design was tested in the Unic Device Lab and enables optimal display on any mobile device. By setting up the project management according to SCRUM, a very close, cooperative and transparent collaboration between those responsible at RhB and Unic was created. The backend functionalities with interface technology for ticketing and seat reservations were implemented by Elca and Infosystem Wil. The texts were written by the PR agency Panta Rhei. Süsskind Grafik from Chur is responsible for image selection and editing.