IRJ tries to explain the EU rail ticketing reform, so I will try to decipher what they were trying to say

The rail trade press - International Railway Journal anyway - has woken up to the fact that there is legislation forthcoming to reform rail ticketing in the EU. You can read their piece here.

The problem is the piece jumbles up a number of the key issues, and I am going to take those apart here.

The article starts well enough - we all know that it is too hard to purchase tickets for international rail trips.

But this middle part - sort of citing Kathrin Obst of DG Move, gets really messy. The ticketing reform - known as SDBTR - is to address three primary questions, and for each of the three questions I quote direct from IRJ:

with some state-owned railways possessing a near monopoly on ticket retailing in their respective national markets, should there be an obligation on these vendors to sell tickets for services provided by all operators, including their competitors?

The crux here is where. The obligations would still be national. DB, for example, would then be obliged to sell everything that runs on German tracks - including European Sleeper, Flixtrain etc., but ultimately that does not solve the international problem - a passenger travelling from France to Germany might still need to consult multiple websites.

should dominant national operators or those holding PSO contracts be obliged to allow third parties to sell tickets on their behalf?

This is only half of the issue! Placing this obligation only on dominant operators is likewise not going to be enough. Obliging ČD, Czechia's dominant operator, to share its data with third parties, but not its private rivals LeoExpress and RegioJet? No way. And also I do not think the Commission itself is even thinking so narrowly. If there is to be a genuine "book any ticket on one platform" solution, it has to have all trains in it - state owned company run and privately run.

if a passenger has purchased a combination of tickets from different operators in a single transaction, should they be offered compensation if a train is delayed and they miss their connection?

This is the issue of whether we need one ticket, or multiple tickets, and - in the case of multiple tickets - whether a rail company needs to know my entire journey chain or not.

Oddly how IRJ quotes Obst in the next paragraph possibly contradicts this:

“We want passengers to be able to get the most out of the system so they can buy easily in one transaction tickets across different operators and combine them in such a way that they don’t get stuck if something goes wrong,” Obst says.

There is a difference between whether a passenger can buy in one transaction, or must buy in one transaction. I fear that making it must is going to pose a problem for regular rail passengers, as I explain here.

Later in the piece, WESTbahn's Thomas Posch is quoted:

"What we have achieved with Klimaticket in Austria for frequent travellers must be the goal for the single ticket market in Europe"

But that poses an issue Posch and IRJ don't answer. Imagine a passenger has a Klimaticket already, and then needs to add a leg onto their journey into Germany. If a passenger is obliged to book everything together in order to get passenger rights, this Klimaticket + something else in Germany solution is impossible. It is a good case for not needing everything in one transaction, a connection IRJ does not make.

Towards the end, the piece explores the points made by Alberto Mazzola of CER, critical of this whole ticketing reform:

[Mazzola] focused his concerns on avoiding a situation experienced in the wider travel market where dominant online sales platforms such as booking.com effectively control access to the market and could potentially charge a commission of 2-3% to rail operators

This is such a ridiculous straw man.

First, a ticket reseller would have to cover credit card charges - that's at least 2%. And those are then charges incumbent operators would not have to cover themselves, if a reseller covers them instead. So the effective commission to incumbents is not 2-3%, but somewhere between 0 and 1%.

Second, better data exchange systems and terms could also allow state incumbents to better exchange data amongst themselves. If DB could get MÁV or Renfe data on decent terms, I am quite sure they would integrate it. So this idea that only third party platforms stand to benefit is dependent on state owned operators' platforms making no progress, when the reality is some of them are advancing.

Third, as I have stated many times, tools like DB Navigator and ÖBB Scotty are miles better than anything any private third party platform has come up with anyway. Add more ticket sales into tools that are already excellent for planning would be a winner. Why is Mazzola so defeatist that private platforms would necessarily win? Does he not believe in the very state owned companies he claims to represent?

Fourth (and this is the point Elmer van Buuren makes when quoted later in the piece): making it easier to book tickets ought to benefit everyone - more tickets sold, regardless of who sells them, will lead to more passengers and more income.

Anyway, I have had a go at explaining the overall lay of the land on this ticketing topic in this post. I am happy to see more public attention to this issue, but we need a little more care in diagnosing what we want, and how we are to get it, as well.

There is also one final issue with IRJ's piece. I assume "Austrian Green MEP, Sophia Kirchner" is actually "Austrian EPP MEP Sophia Kircher". They did get her country and first name right, so two out of four.