Currently, travelling by train across European borders can involve navigating multiple booking platforms, different providers, and often confusing schedules.
This can make the sustainable travel option of going by rail complicated and expensive and flights often end up being the easier option.
However, to make train travel more convenient, the EU Transport Commission has announced it is now launching a new push to create a single European booking system for train tickets.
One ticket for the whole trip
Some booking platforms that facilitate train trips across borders already exist, such as Omio and RailEurope.
However, even though these platforms can be used to find international train routes, tickets are currently sold separately for each part of the journey.
Without the option to buy a single ticket for the entire trip, booking gets complicated, passenger rights do not apply if connections are missed, and travellers are left to cover extra costs on their own.
At a hearing on November 5th, EU Transport Commissioner-designate Apostolos Tzitzikostas announced that he wants to change this.
His goal is to launch an EU-wide booking system by 2025, which would allow passengers to buy one single ticket for their entire cross-border journey.
“It is unbelievable that we do not have this in 2024,” he said during the hearing, and added that the new system would make booking trains across Europe as easy as booking a flight.
READ ALSO: The big changes for train travel across Europe in 2024
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A project to simplify international train travel has been proposed before.
In 2021, the current EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen introduced a plan to create platforms where travellers could book all their transportation in one place—trains, flights, rental cars, buses, and even e-scooters.
The plan also called for transport companies to share their data in a standardised way to make this possible.
However, the project failed due to differing interests among transport providers. Rail companies feared competition from smaller outfits, airlines also resisted extra regulation, and concerns over the growing power of travel tech giants like Booking.com and Skyscanner also hindered progress.
Additionally, unresolved issues around responsibility for delays and missed connections also contributed to the project’s failure.
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A new approach on the way?
The EU Commission’s new attempt has a different approach, breaking the project into smaller stages.
By the end of 2025, a regulation for uniform train tickets will be introduced. At the same time, Tzitzikostas is working on another initiative to expand passengers’ rights and improve multimodal travel (how to combine flights and trains).
This step-by-step approach aims to avoid delays caused by disagreements over specific details.
However, Tzitzikostas has not clarified how the trans-European ticket system would work. It is also not clear whether companies should be required to share their data, as the earlier plan proposed.
Meanwhile, the European rail companies are already working on their own solution called The Open Sales and Distribution Model (OSDM), which is developing a unified online booking standard for 22 European national rail companies.
However, unlike the EU’s original plan, participation in this model is voluntary, and companies can choose who can access their data.
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Technical issues
Even with a unified booking system, major challenges in cross-border European train travel will still remain.
In the hearing, Tzitzikostas explained that train travel between countries like France and Germany requires navigating different signalling systems. Drivers also need to know multiple languages at a B1 level, and trains often need to change locomotives at borders.
Another big issue is the varying track gauges (the distance between rails) across Europe. Most EU countries use a standard gauge, but Spain, Portugal, and other countries such as Ukraine use wider gauges.
Tzitzikostas plans to propose a major effort to standardise track widths across Europe, though it would be a costly and complex project.
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