Europe’s rail renaissance will never reach its full potential unless passengers are able to book connecting and international trains in a few clicks. That’s the conclusion of new research by T&E which finds that on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, booking the same journey by train is difficult or impossible.
T&E looked at the 30 busiest international air routes within the EU to see if the rail alternative was easy to book. On 20% of these routes, none of the rail operators allowed passengers to buy tickets for the whole journey. On a further 27% of the routes, passengers could only obtain such tickets from one of the train operators involved [1]. Similar trends were found on a broader set of 50 international routes [2].
This finding is concerning as rail passengers tend to primarily buy tickets on the booking engine of their national incumbent operator [3]. The convoluted booking experience is deterring all but the most committed. A recent YouGov poll for T&E found that 61% of long distance rail travellers have at least once avoided journeys because the booking process is a hassle.
Research by the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in Austria finds that on average it takes people 70% longer to book a train ticket than a flight [4]. The new T&E research suggests this could be due to popular journeys being impossible to book from any rail operator's website, such as Lisbon to Madrid or Barcelona to Milan from any rail operator’s website, while others such as Paris-Rome and Amsterdam-Milan are only bookable from one operator’s platform [5].
Finding competitors’ tickets
It is also difficult for passengers to discover where competing operators have entered the market. On almost nine out of 10 legs (86%) where competition exists, the incumbent operators’ websites don’t sell new entrants’ tickets. On almost six out of 10 legs (59%), they don’t even display them [6]. (....)