Europe’s rail renaissance will never reach its full potential unless passengers are able to book connecting and international trains in a few clicks. That’s the conclusion of new research by T&E (Transport & Environment), which finds that on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, booking the same journey by train is difficult or impossible.
The NGO examined the 30 busiest international air routes within the EU to determine whether the rail alternative was easy to book. On 20% of these routes, none of the rail operators allowed passengers to buy tickets for the whole journey. On an additional 27% of the routes, passengers could obtain such tickets only from one of the participating train operators. Similar trends were found on a broader set of 50 international routes.
The booking experience is deterring
This finding is concerning, as rail passengers primarily buy tickets on their national incumbent operator’s booking engine. The convoluted booking experience is deterring all but the most committed. A recent YouGov poll for T&E found that 61% of long-distance rail travelers have avoided journeys at least once because the booking process is a hassle.
Research by the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in Austria finds that, on average, it takes people 70% longer to book a train ticket than a flight. The new T&E research suggests this could be due to popular journeys being impossible to book on any rail operator’s website, such as Lisbon to Madrid or Barcelona to Milan, while others, such as Paris-Rome and Amsterdam-Milan, are only bookable on one operator’s platform.
Competitors’ tickets often difficult to find
It is also difficult for passengers to discover where competing operators have entered the market. On almost nine out of 10 legs (86%) where competition exists, the incumbent operators’ websites don’t sell new entrants’ tickets. On almost six out of 10 legs (59%), they don’t even display them [6].
This hits passengers’ wallets. Renfe’s tickets are on average a third more expensive than their competitors’, analysis by T&E based on data from Spain’s national competition authority shows. Without showing all operators’ ticket prices, rail users may never see substantially cheaper options.
The EU now has an opportunity to address these shortcomings. T&E calls on the European Commission’s forthcoming Single Ticketing Package to require major rail operators to display and sell other willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions and to share their own tickets with other operators and independent platforms. Independent platforms must also be required to sell willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions.
Georgia Whitaker, Rail Campaign Manager at T&E, summarizes: “Too often, passengers trying to book low-carbon international train journeys are faced with headaches due to opaque and complicated booking systems. This has to change. The European Commission needs to deliver a Single Ticketing Package that makes rail travel as simple as booking a flight. It’s time to drag the rail ticketing system out of the stone age.”
The proposal for the new Single Ticketing Package is due to be published by the European Commission on the 13th of May.
