For the past few years the state owned railways in Europe – represented in Brussels by Community of European Railways (CER) – have been working on their “Ticketing Roadmap” (yes, don’t laugh, railway companies really have a roadmap). This roadmap is the railways’ response to customer and political demands to better sort out Europe-wide railway ticketing.
The gist of CER’s approach is essentially this: politicians, please leave us railways alone, we need no new law, and we will fix these problems ourselves.
So what then is the central plank of this approach?
It is the Open Sales and Distribution Model (OSDM), a technical standard to allow railway companies to more easily sell each other’s tickets.
But this is essentially the role OSDM plays for CER and its boss Alberto Mazzola – it gives them cover. Strip away OSDM and the railways are left naked.
Putting it another way: that railways can share their data does not mean that they will.
Will the full implementation of OSDM solve the problems at Breil sur Roya (France-Italy border, map here) where despite half the trains going to Italy, the SNCF ticket office refuses to sell Trenitalia tickets? No it won’t – because the problem here is not the standard, the problem here is the lack of will, and OSDM does not solve that.
Will OSDM solve the problem that Deutsche Bahn does not sell tickets for private night train start-up European Sleeper? No it won’t, because it is not about the standard, it is about the lack of obligation – DB fears that if it has to sell European Sleeper tickets then it will have to sell Flixtrain tickets too. European Sleeper is already OSDM compliant, but as DB’s Alexander Mokros lets slip on LinkedIn here, there are currently “no plans” to sell their tickets. For even more examples of the ticketing issues that need solving, see this report I wrote for Jakop Dalunde.
And even were data exchange on a given route good enough to enable a passenger to book in one transaction, the roadmap and OSDM do not solve the problem of the lack of passenger rights. That instead is part solved by Railteam and the Agreement on Journey Continuation, but both of those are so fiendishly hard for passengers to use that I needed to make some insanely complex flow charts to explain them.
Don’t get me wrong – a common standard for ticket data sharing is not a bad idea in itself. Anything that reduces the costs for railway companies to facilitate data sharing is fine in principle (although as this piece by Toma Bačić explains, there is a question mark as to whether OSDM is even the right standard). But it will not solve the problems passengers face currently when booking international train journeys.
To conclude, the Ticketing Roadmap is just a cover. It is a means for CER to claim that the railways are doing something, a means to head off the danger of data sharing obligations and binding multi-operator passenger rights being imposed on them in law. But sorry, state owned railways, your time is up. You’ve been failing to solve these problems for two decades (and even going backwards), and now the European Commission is so annoyed that the issue even made it into von der Leyen’s political priorities. New EU law is the only way to fix this mess.
Image rights
Photo montage by Jon Worth, using the following images
Michelangelo’s David – right view – Commonists – 1 August 2021 – CC BY-SA 4.0
39 545th Plenary Session -_TEN_691_5.jpg TEN/691 – Alberto MAZZOLA – EESC – 17/07/2019 – Public Access
OSDM Logo from CIT Rail
Breil sur Roya photos by Jon Worth
Absolutely right, and let’s all keep up the political pressure.
In the meantime I can add to your collection of cross-border ticket fiasco stories.
A couple of Sundays ago, I needed to book a single ticket from Colmar, where I was staying, to Karlsruhe next day (from where I’d catch the night sleeper back to Prague). First I tried my SNCF Connect app, seeing as I was in France, but it wanted nothing to do with such a request, of course, so I went to my DB Navigator app.It duly offered me a range of options all changing at Strasbourg as expected, for an all-in price. Good. However when I chose the one that suited me it issued me with grave warnings that I would only get my tickets by e-mail, the app would have no trace of the ticket or the transaction. The excuse? It’s a cross-border journey. This does not seem to matter when I use my Czech Muj Vlak app for numerous journeys from Prague to Germany or Austria, so I guess the problem is with SNCF. But e-mail was OK for me, so I clicked. The transaction went through. Briefly, on the screen I saw the ticket with QR code for the French portion flash up. Then it disappeared, never to be seen again. But more worryingly, no emails had appeared. Of course I checked junk, refreshed several time, and then I decided to leave it til the morning.
But in the morning there was still nothing. I had to buy a new ticket. So this time I bought Colmar-Strasbourg on SNCF Connect – fine. Then I went to DB Navigator. Also fine -although this time I used Apple Pay linked to a different card because with Germany and cards, you never know. But meanwhile the transaction for the failed effort the previous evening was there on my bank statement. It was marked as “on hold”. I contacted DB customer service on Twitter to ask about this. To be fair they responded quickly, and said I would receive the refund automatically within 7 working days. Well, I didn’t. The transaction went through. Last night I had to send them a stroppy email with a screenshot from my internet banking – the only documentary evidence of my failed attempt to purchase.
Fortunately I had the financial resources to be able to bear the temporary loss of €56, and the knowledge acquired from people like Jon to know roughly what was going on – although this is a new and quite serious glitch. Less well resourced or experienced travellers would have found this pretty stressful, I think.
The night sleeper wasn’t without its ticket hassle either. It’s the “Canopus” – some Czech cars attached to an Austrian NightJet running between Zurich and Berlin. But both CD and OBB sell the tickets for the Czech sleeper. I’d booked back in May, and OBB on this occasion was slightly cheaper, but still a pretty outrageous €278 (for the so-called deluxe single berth). When I boarded at Karlsruhe (at 23.07) I showed what I thought was the ticket on my OBB app, -it had the QR code. But it wasn’t enough for him. He wanted a PDF of the full ticket and I just didn’t know where to find it. He really was insistent. Eventually -took probably a good 10 minutes -we found it buried deep in the confirmation email. To be fair this is flagged up in that email ;. If it’s a cross border journey they want you to print off your PDF ticket. Yet at the same time they warn you ” Please collect your ticket as shortly as possible before the journey starts.” because once you’ve printed them cancellation is no longer possible. Yeah, well people don’t normally travel on international rail journeys with a printer, do they? And that’s why I hadn’t printed it off before I left home
On top of that, there was quite an annoying hum in my cabin that I found disturbing, and I know these sleepers, this wasn’t normal. But when I mentioned it to the conductor in the morning he said it was not the aircon because he’d turned it off. And of course, the alleged restaurant car supposedly attached at Leipzig in the morning, didn’t show up. It hardly ever has done this year, as far as I can tell (twice for me, plus VagonWeb observation reports) And the breakfast offered in the “de-luxe” sleeping car is sub-standard. €278? You’re having a laugh. But that’s a different topic.
I’ve written up the whole trip if anyone’s interested, it s a bit of an essay and covers a lot of different topics, including the rock band I went all the way to see, and the fact that on the outward journey – confession time – I flew to Zurich. But that at least allowed me to experience how a proper, integrated railway works…