‘My Driver by Thalys’ service adds new mobility options

Thalys has selected Karhoo, the open mobility exchange platform, to power ‘My Driver by Thalys’ – it’s new first-and-last mile travel service.

Passengers accessing the Thalys app and website will be able to pre-book rides from a range of local and national taxi and private hire vehicle (PHV) fleets provided by the Karhoo marketplace.

Rides from around 50 taxi and PHV fleets will be available for the approximately 7.85 million passengers served by the high-speed operator to compare and order. Customers will be able to pre-book their transport to and from the station when purchasing train tickets, or even while travelling up to 45 minutes in advance.

Bruno Dierickx, Marketing & Commercial Director at Thalys, explained: “Offering travel to and from the station to simplify our passenger’s door-to-door journeys felt like a natural extension of our customer relationships. However, customer expectations around e-hailing and mobility have risen so high that we knew if we wanted to compete, we needed to get the digital user experience just right. Karhoo is the engine that runs our new My Driver by Thalys service. It enables us to offer greater choice and flexibility to our customers in each of our four countries while delivering the first-class digital experience that users today are so used to.”

Caroline Simmerman, Karhoo’s VP of Business Development – Travel Operators, added that Thalys are not the only operator adding further mobility options to their offering. “Last year we helped SNCF Mobilités to launch its “Mon Chauffeur” service – which has already seen significant use. We also helped Renfe in Spain to launch its new mobile app, ‘Renfe as a Service’ (RaaS). So this is certainly a trend we expect to see grow and mature in the year ahead as train operators seek to expand their relevance to passengers.”