One ticket, or more than one ticket, for my international train trip? More than one, with passenger rights, is the simpler solution

"Cross-border train travel is still too difficult for many citizens" were the words in Ursula von der Leyen's political guidelines for the 2024-2029 European Commission (PDF here).

The document continues, bold is my emphasis: "People should be able to use open booking systems to purchase trans-European journeys with several providers, without losing their right to reimbursement or compensatory travel. To this end we will propose a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation, to ensure that Europeans can buy one single ticket on one single platform and get passengers’ rights for their whole trip."

Now this spring, as we await the draft Regulation on this from the European Commission (it will be called SDBTR), we are still stuck with this still do not have an answer to this core question: should I need to have one single ticket for my journey?

At present, whether I have one single ticket (also known as a through ticket) or more than one ticket is a crucial distinction.

If I have one ticket for my entire trip I have passenger rights - including the right to a night in a hotel paid by the rail company - if I am stranded. If I have more than one ticket I have only Agreement on Journey Continuation (AJC) or Railteam provisions, both of which are considerably weaker and harder to use, and no rights to overnight accommodation.

To illustrate the absurdity of this, some examples.

Travelling from Hannover (Germany) to Barcelona (Spain) I likely will have 3 tickets (Hannover - Mannheim with DB, Mannheim - Lyon with SNCF, Lyon - Barcelona with Renfe).

However were my trip Hannover (Germany) to Zagreb (Croatia), crossing both Austria and Slovenia, DB would be able to sell me the whole lot in one ticket.

Hannover - Barcelona: 3 tickets
Hannover - Zagreb: 1 ticket

So what do you do about this?

You could either force all railway companies to cooperate and be able to sell you a single ticket to any destination. Or you sort out the passenger rights situation in the case of multiple tickets.

As I see it forcing hundreds of rail companies, Europe-wide - be they state owned or privately owned - to collaborate and find an IT solution to be able to sell everything as a single ticket is a very complicated solution, and one that will come up against huge internal opposition. "You expect me to be able to sell you a ticket to Tallinn from Lisboa? Forget it!"

If instead a passenger has multiple tickets for their trip, and everywhere they change trains the minimum connection time is respected, then a passenger needs to be conferred the same rights as if they had one ticket, and the operator who foots the cost for the disrupted passenger (pays for the hotel, for example) then needs a system to claim these costs from the operator that caused the problem in the first place.

So, I think von der Leyen's text should have been: "To this end we will propose a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation, to ensure that Europeans can buy tickets for their entire journey on one single platform and get passengers’ rights for their whole trip."

For more background, I have explained in more detail how to do this legally in this post, and how to overcome the issues with compulsory reservation services in this post. I was motivated to write this further post this morning having read this position paper from private rail firms lobby association Allrail about ticketing, and where they tie themselves in a terrible knot as to whether through tickets should be pushed for or not.