Berthelet and Hubup : the management of interconnections with Geolite
With over a year of partnership experience with Hubup, Berthelet has won new contracts on which our solution will be implemented, namely the airport shuttles at Lyon Saint-Exupéry since November 16 and the ski resort shuttles in Méribel for the winter season 2022/2023.
Jeremy, could you briefly introduce yourself?
Can you give us a quick overview of Berthelet, its activities that are focused on tourism and on interurban and peri-urban transport?
There’s a depot in Crémieu where we handle interurban activity, with around fifty vehicles.
Another depot at Saint-Exupéry, with about ten vehicles, dedicated to airport shuttles, both on the runway and in parking areas.
The activity of Transports Guillermin (a family-owned business acquired by Berthelet in 2019) in Chimilin involves interurban, school transport, and a few urban lines. In Cevins, we manage the Méribus shuttles (now operated by Transdev Savoie) for the Méribel ski resort, with a highly seasonal activity, as well as some school transport contracts in the valley and day trips for the rest of the year.
In summary, we have 70% of our activity in public contracts, including regular school transport and lines for our public service delegation with the TCL network in the East of Lyon, as well as contracts with the region for school transport. The remaining 30% is related to occasional tourism-related activities.
We also have a site in Saint-Genis-Laval for the company N&M, focusing on professional tourist transport.
Our partnership, which started over a year ago now, was established for a specific context at your end. Can you tell us more about it, Jeremy? In what scope was our solution implemented, and what were your main objectives at the time of its implementation?
The goal was to completely renew ourselves, to make a historic leap forward for the company because we were breaking a bit from the traditional approach. Before, it was really onboard equipment, pure and simple; a control panel focused solely on the Operations control system, managing the passenger information system with some issues. That’s why we launched a consultation in May or June 2020, and Hubup caught our attention.
Digital was really emphasized to meet the requirements of the SYTRAL specifications for this new DSP with many more features.
Regarding the aspects you mentioned about the strategy you had for this renewal, do you consider it more or less successful in achieving this goal? Or are there still things to be done in that regard?
Now, in case of a breakdown, if the passenger doesn’t have the information, our drivers still have the ability to get assistance from the operation, and vice versa.
Since you have already worked with Lumiplan on interconnections, and we work with them for all passenger information, we were able to achieve intercommunication that provides transparency for the driver. In the end, they don’t realize that Operations control system and PIS are now differentiated.
When you reviewed the various proposals from the stakeholders, what were the elements that stood out in the offer that we jointly presented to you with Zenbus?
And let’s not kid ourselves; the pricing aspect also played a major role. You were very competitively priced, so that had a significant impact.
To be honest, that’s somewhat our approach. The idea is to offer something that is functionally close to the robust but financially at the level of the lightweight. How did the implementation go?
From a technical standpoint, we encountered some complex challenges, particularly in dealing with the SYTRAL ecosystem. On your end, how did you perceive the technical support that we were able to provide?
Everything went well since we managed to do almost everything. The only thing left is to implement the ticketing system, and then it will be good.