In July 2025, NS selected Wiremind's CAYZN following a public tender, recognizing it as the solution best positioned to evolve alongside their operational needs. The collaboration supports NS's broader ambition to strengthen the role of rail in everyday mobility: encouraging smarter travel choices and making better use of available capacity across its nationwide network.

Their first use case with CAYZN is dynamic discounting. NS's PrijsTijd Deals have existed for a while: discounted tickets on specific trains at specific times, designed to spread travelers more evenly throughout the day. Until recently, those discounts were entirely static: fixed by route and time slot, unchanged day-to-day.

The results were visibly impactful. In the past year, 700,000 unique travelers used PrijsTijd Deals, generating 1.5 million tickets sold and 55 million additional travel kilometers; with first class uptake at 6%, double the usual 3%.

That success is what drove NS to take the next step: replacing static discount logic with a dynamic system, and bringing in Wiremind's CAYZN to do it.

A Different Use Case for Revenue Management

CAYZN powers revenue management across rail, aviation, and bus; helping operators like SNCF, Eurostar, Transavia, and BlaBlaCar optimize ticket prices and load factors in real time across thousands of departures. In rail specifically, CAYZN handles a wide-range of use cases including the complexity of multiple legs, walk-ups, or large network-wide schedules.

NS is leveraging CAYZN for a very unique use case. The idea is that the base price of any journey stays fixed within NS. What CAYZN determines is the discount level: how much of a reduction to offer, on which trains, at which times, and how many tickets at each discount level can be sold.

The split of responsibilities is clear. NS owns the base price and capacity. CAYZN analyzes demand patterns, traveler movements, and marketer-defined business rules to recommend discount percentages. NS's MRP team (Microservices, Travel and Prices) then tracks the virtual capacity and keeps both systems in sync.

The Virtual Capacity Solution

NS operates more like a metro than a traditional railway: no seat reservations and no fixed time schedule for a ticket. This means there is no traditional inventory to manage; anyone can board any train at any time. To work with this system, CAYZN uses virtual capacity derived from check-in and check-out data combined with historical patterns.

Because passengers board and alight at different stops, available capacity isn't uniform across a train's journey. A train from Groningen to Utrecht might have 100 virtual seats overall, but only five available on the Amersfoort to Utrecht leg if that segment consistently runs full. Since a discounted ticket for the full Groningen to Utrecht journey occupies capacity on every segment it covers, including that last leg, the number of discounted tickets that can be sold for the whole route is capped at five. Hence the tightest segment on any journey determines the ceiling for discounts on that entire trip - and CAYZN tracks this at segment level to make sure discounts are never oversold.

The Road to Full Optimization

Wiremind is training CAYZN to build up enough history - ticket sales, capacity data, demand patterns - for its optimization to run full autonomously. In the meantime, pricing marketers set the Business Rules that drive the discount recommendations.

Each night, NS checks CAYZN to compare records and fix any differences so it stays aligned, since ticket sales are processed at different times.

What Comes Next

The current rollout covers PrijsTijd Deal tickets specifically. As historical data accumulates, CAYZN's discount recommendations will become increasingly accurate and automated; moving NS from a system where discounts have been manually configured in the past to one where they respond continuously to actual demand using CAYZN.

If you’re interested to dive deeper, check out the full webinar here in Dutch. Discover how you can take advantage of our AI-powered Revenue Management System, CAYZN, today. Reach out to us for a demo here.

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