T&E: Flawed booking systems are preventing passengers from travelling by rail.

Booking multi-country connecting flights is a snap. But booking rail connections on the same journeys is not. Research released today from the Brussels-based advocacy organization Transport & Environment (T&E) illustrates.

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. Similar trends were found on a broader set of 50 international routes.

This finding is concerning as rail passengers tend to primarily buy tickets on the booking engine of their national incumbent operator. 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.

And, according to a research team at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in Austria, on average it takes people 70% longer to book a train ticket than a flight.

And the fix:

The EU now has an opportunity to address these shortcomings. T&E calls on the European Commission’s forthcoming Single Ticketing Package to require major rail operators to display and sell other willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions and to share their own tickets with other operators and independent platforms. Independent platforms must also be required to sell willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions.

The proposal for the new Single Ticketing Package is due to be published by the European Commission on 13 May.

Link.