Yves Vieux-Pernon, project manager at Thalys, says: “The decision to create thalys.mobi was an obvious one. Because our customers are travelers, they are mobile and they need to access information when they are on the move. From a marketing perspective, this is another communication channel with which we can reach our customers.”

Thalys turned to Bytes and Com for help in building the site. After studying the market and identifying the needs and expectations of Thalys’ customers, it got down to work adapting the content to suit the restrictions of mobile devices. Pascal Debroux, from Bytes and Com, says that while content is important, mobile-user behavior was key in driving development.

“The future of mobile internet services is real-time information,” Debroux says. “People want the latest, most up-to-date information. So we needed to make a site that could be updated constantly.”

Ease of use was prioritized in the site development. When a person visits thalys.mobi, the site identifies the mobile device and pushes either the WAP 1.0 or the XHTML version of the site. But customers can also choose to use the WAP 1.0 version if they are concerned about high surfing costs or do not know details of their mobile internet connections.

The site is optimized for mobile phone screens and almost all content is just one click away. The only pages that are not yet strictly compliant with W3C guidelines are the “conditions of use” and “description of tariffs” pages, where Thalys has published its legal information.

Thalys.mobi was launched on September 9, with a press release sent out several days later. By September 26, the site was getting close to 50 visits a day, Vieux-Pernon says. “This is still the early days and we haven’t updated our dotcom site with information about dotmobi yet. It is too early to say how the dotmobi site will affect our results, but we expect many customers to use the site.”

Thalys is working on a module for real-time traffic information. Each train is equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology so that delays can be reported immediately to travelers. The service is expected to be available on thalys.mobi by the beginning of 2007. Further down the line, the company is looking into mobile ticketing.

Thalys website
Thalys.mobi simulator (on PC)
dotMobi website 
dotMobi investors 
Bytes and Com website  
Article on the launch of dotmobi

By Aimée Ravacon