LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency excel forward

Upgrading to the Cloud Fast Track

The Los Angeles–San Diego–San Luis Obispo (LOSSAN) Rail Corridor Agency assumed operational management for the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner service in 2015.

The Pacific Surfliner travels across 351-miles of coastal rail route through San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties, serving 27 stations.

It is the busiest state-supported intercity passenger rail route in the United States with 26 daily trains and annual ridership of nearly 3 million.

“The Pacific Surfliner is a critical vehicle for connecting diverse and unique communities to iconic attractions and popular destinations across Southern California,” said Emilia Doerr, Marketing and Communications Manager at the LOSSAN Agency. “When we assumed management of the service, we knew we needed to make our website reflect that. We needed an experience-driven site that would help us compete with the prevalent car culture in California and ultimately inspire more people to travel by train.”

The site was orginally built on the legacy Ektron CMS. Although practical, it did not deliver the customer-centric experience LOSSAN were keen to implement. They were keen to capture the elastic-scale that could handle a peak in online visitors with no downtime. With an agile team, it also meant there was no heavy reliance on an IT team, and instead LOSSAN could focus on exceeding passenger needs and customer service.

Migrating away from Ektron also meant personalization was made achieveable. Visitor Groups to reach different audience segments was possible with this feature being out-the-box with, Optimizely.

After a competitive procurement process, Nansen was selected as the LOSSAN Agency’s implementation partner, and as an Optimizely Gold Partner the Nansen team is highly specialized in Optimizely solutions.

The new Pacific Surfliner website was also honored with the 2019 ‘Most Innovative Digital Solution’ Web Award at Ascend, Optimizely’s annual user conference.