Booking international train tickets in Europe is still too difficult, an organisation promoting clean transport has said, as it called on the European Commission to force operators to make processes easier.
Transport & Environment (T&E), a green group which counts Natuur en Milieu and Friends of the Earth Netherlands among its members, published on Tuesday an analysis of the ticketing system for the rail alternatives to the 30 busiest international air routes in the EU, excluding islands and trips over 1,500 kilometres. These routes usually involve several rail operators.
In almost half of the cases booking the same journey by train was hard or impossible, the research found. On 20% of these routes, including Barcelona-Milan, none of the rail operators allowed passengers to buy tickets for the whole journey. In another 27%, including Amsterdam-Milan, tickets could only be obtained from one of the operators involved.
On independent platforms, such as Trainline, Omio or Rail Europe, 77% of journeys above 900 kilometres were available as a single booking, but prices were significantly higher than on rail operators’ websites.
Partly this is because rail operators’ own discount fares are often missing from third-party platforms. The report says NS standard ticket prices were similar across all booking engines tested, but the NS Voordeel discount was not on independent platforms – though NS told T&E it offers the discount to all resellers. The Eurostar SNAP fare, which sells Amsterdam-Paris tickets for €45 against a standard €98, also appeared only on Eurostar’s own site.
National incumbent operators also rarely display competitors’ services on their own platforms, preventing customers from comparing them or becoming aware of the alternatives, the group said.
NS performs well
On the NS booking platform, it was possible to book tickets for the entire journey on 8 out of 9 international routes – Amsterdam to Copenhagen, Milan, Frankfurt, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna and Prague. The only one not available was Amsterdam-Warsaw.
Of the 3 international routes opened to competition in the Netherlands (Amsterdam-Berlin, Amsterdam-Brussels and Amsterdam-Prague), NS shows and sells the ticket for the full journey, or redirects customers to the relevant website.
“The NS platform performs comparatively pretty well at showing international cross-border rail tickets”, Georgia Whitaker, rail campaign manager at T&E, told DutchNews. “But rail users travelling from or to the Netherlands are among the most exposed to having to pay for extra tickets in the event of delays”.
“While NS, Eurostar and DB are part of the Agreement on Journey Continuation (AJC), which allows passengers to get on the next train without any extra cost, rail entrants generally aren’t. And these amount to half of the operators running passenger services on Dutch rail tracks”, she said.
A YouGov poll for T&E found that 61% of long-distance rail passengers had at least once avoided journeys because of the complicated booking process.
New EU rules
The European Commission is expected to propose on 13 May a regulation for a single train booking and ticketing system. T&E says major operators should be required to display and sell other operators’ tickets under fair conditions and share their own ticket data with other operators and independent platforms.
“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”, said Whitaker.
