When Ursula von der Leyen’s released her political guidelines for her second term as President of the European Commission, there it was – a commitment to fix railway ticketing in the EU, including passenger rights:
“Cross-border train travel is still too difficult for many citizens. 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.” Ursula von der Leyen, Political Guidelines for the European Commission 18.07.2024 (PDF here)
This was repeated, more or less word for word in her letter to the nominee for European Commissioner for Transport Tzitzikostas:
“You will prepare a proposal for a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation to ensure that Europeans can buy one single ticket on one single platform and benefit from passenger rights protection for their whole trip.” Letter from Ursula von der Leyen to Apostolos Tzitzikostas 17.09.2024 (PDF here)
Tzitzikostas – in his written answers to the European Parliament’s questionnaire prior to the hearings in November, goes further – the draft is expected in 2025:
“To further support modal shift and promote cross-border travel, I will put forward a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation for rail, complementing and improving existing obligations in this area, as well as a multimodal digital mobility services initiative to make it easier for our citizens to opt for more sustainable travel options.” (Page 4) “As explained above, I also intend to launch an initiative to address multimodal ticketing as soon as possible, including through a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation by the end of 2025, complementing and improving existing obligations in this area, as well as by a multimodal digital mobility services initiative, to make travel options by rail easier to access and to enhance the protection of passengers.” (Page 7), Questionnaire to the Commissioner-designate Apostolos Tzitzikostas Sustainable Transport and Tourism 23.10.2024 (PDF here)
In other words it is now no longer a question of if the European Commission will put forward a draft – it will. It is no longer a question of when, for it will happen in 2025. It is now time to move to how the European Commission proposes to solve the Europe-wide ticketing problem.
In my previous pieces about this – one about the overall motivation for the Commission to act, a further one about why I do not trust the industry to solve this themselves, and a third on why state incumbents like Deutsche Bahn are missing a trick here – I have explained plenty of the background.
So let us begin to examine the how.
Here the wording of von der Leyen’s two texts frustrates me a little: aim for “one single ticket” and I fear this is doomed to fail. Aim for “tickets booked in one single transaction, with passenger rights guaranteed” and success is more likely.
Let us imagine a passenger is making a trip from Nice to Lisboa. They would need a SNCF ticket Nice-Marseille, a Renfe ticket Marseille-Madrid-Badajoz, and a CP ticket Badajoz-Lisboa. There are no alternatives to any of these companies for each leg of this trip at the time of writing. Tickets for all parts of the trip are at least partially yield managed (meaning cheap but inflexible off peak tickets are available).
Try to bundle all of that together into one ticket (also known as a through ticket) is going to be complete hell, administratively. Renfe is incapable of giving a passenger one single ticket if you change from their own long distance onto their own Cercanías local trains within Spain. Ask them to add CP and SNCF and whoever else’s trains into the mix and it is hopeless.
The simpler way in my view is to build on and improve the existing system.
Book a complicated international trip on a site like Trainline or International Bahn today and you do not receive one ticket, but multiple tickets – at least one per operator. For the Nice-Lisboa example above, a passenger would receive at least 4 tickets, but these would be booked in one transaction.
The problem is missing passenger rights currently. Were – say – my Madrid-Badajoz Renfe train to break down, leaving me stranded in Badajoz because the CP Badajoz-Entroncamento-Lisboa had already departed, I would have to foot the costs for a night in a hotel on my own. The solution would be a guaranteed compensation system. Regardless of how many tickets I have, and regardless of operators, I would not be left out of pocket as a passenger – providing I had respected the minimum stipulated connecting times. The existing Agreement on Journey Continuation – and informal agreement between railway firms that is fiendishly complicated to use – would need to be simplified and given legal teeth to make this work, and the law would apply to both state owned and private operators.
So the first question to Tzitzikostas – does he want to insist on one single ticket, or are multiple tickets with a guaranteed passenger rights system a better way?
Then comes the question of who should sell the ticket.
Von der Leyen’s text stating booking should be “on one single platform” is a possible cause for confusion, although her July text also mentions “open booking systems” (note the plural).
The reason at the moment that no-one – neither a state owned railway company nor a private third party platform like Trainline – can sell Nice-Lisboa is that no one other than CP themselves has full access to CP’s ticketing inventory. Even Renfe, the state rail company in neighbouring Spain, cannot sell a Badajoz (the border station)-Lisboa ticket, even though Badajoz is actually on Spanish territory.
Railway companies sharing data with their immediate neighbours is no solution – because that does not cover three or four country trips (more common in central Europe than in south west Europe I admit!). Railway companies sharing data with one central EU mandated platform is an excessively centralised answer – we do not need one centrally mandated platform for air tickets, so I do not see why we need one for rail.
As I see it, the solution here is to mandate all railway companies, whether state or private, to make their entire ticketing inventory available to third parties – with no exceptions. A platform selling any such tickets would then also be entitled to a commission from the sale to cover their costs. This might then mean I can buy a Nice-Lisboa from SNCF, from Renfe, from Trainline or even from Deutsche Bahn – as a customer I would have a choice of plaforms from which I could book.
So the second question to Tzitzikostas – does he want to see one single platform for rail ticket sales, or multiple platforms?
Beyond these two central questions there are a whole bunch of further details the Commission is going to have to tackle, such as how to apply FRAND principles and police them, how a compensation system between railway companies should be structured (as some rail firms will cause more delays for their neighbours than others), and whether one or more than one technical standard for exchange of ticketing data make sense (many state owned railways are insisting on OSDM as the standard, but the EU Agency for Railways is sceptical). But all of these issues flow from the answers to the two core questions.
So put 18:30 CET on 4th November in your calendars, and follow the live stream of the hearing here – and let’s start to get some answers as to how this ticketing reform is going to look.
personnally, I’d settle for a warranty between local or regional trains and far distance ones, as was the case in 1995 in France, before the privatization directive of 1996
Personally, I think you’re not correct here. There is no 1996 privatisation directive. And look at rail passenger rights in Germany for example, and they are guaranteed regardless of who the operator of a regional train is (some are private operators, some still DB (state owned)). So nationally at least we do not need new European law to solve this. That some countries like, oh, France, are malevolent on this point has nothing to do with EU law.
Pingback: Flagging accessibility as EU eyes cross-border rail through-ticketing - Runway GirlRunway Girl
Hello Jon, thanks for this. Related: I picked up a piece of Brussels gossip according to which rail companies are not interested in becoming integrated into larger networks (the gossip in question was about intermodality), because they claim to be maxed out. They cannot add many more passengers without expanding the network, and that does not look likely. You could still beat the companies into delivering better services to us who already use trains, but the case is stronger if it happens in a scenario of expansion of rail travel.
Yes, I hear this regularly, and – for most of Europe – it’s complete rubbish, and is borne of laziness. “Why should we make ticketing easier because our routes are already full”
Did you ever hear Michael O’Leary of Ryanair say that? No, he’d buy more planes.
Did rail companies – for routes where there is spare capacity – buy more trains? Generally no, they did not. They sought to put more and more passengers onto fewer and fewer trains.
So essentially yes, your gossip is right – rail firms don’t want to integrate and don’t want to run more trains – because that requires work, planning, new workshops, different financial models. And sticking to the status quo is easier.
But – in a Europe faced with climate change and needing to decarbonise – it is not nearly enough.