Features

Taking the strain

27 Oct 2008 by Alex McWhirter

More international travellers want to go by rail but European train companies aren’t making it easy, as Alex McWhirter discovers.

The climate for high-speed rail travel within mainland Europe has never been more favourable. Environmental pressures and airport hassles are conspiring to make more and more executives consider the train rather than the plane or their company cars.  

“Firms are more rail-orientated than before and there’s increasing demand for shorter distance rail travel,” says Michael Birtles, managing director of specialist agent European Rail. “Responsible companies must now show a lower carbon footprint. When booking tickets for their bosses, the PAs would previously never have considered the train, but they’re now forced to do so because of the issue of CO2 emissions.”

For these and other reasons many publications, ourselves included, have regularly talked about a rail renaissance. True, it has occurred on some routes. Many executives both from the UK and mainland Europe have defected from flying or been lured out of their company cars when taking short trips such as Frankfurt-Cologne or Paris-Brussels. So successful has the train been on these fast sectors that competing air services have disappeared.

But the picture remains mixed elsewhere. On domestic routes within France and Germany, high-speed rail services have taken market share from the airlines, but the latter haven’t disappeared from the skies. On longer cross-border trips like those covered by the new TGV Est line (which links Paris with Frankfurt and Stuttgart) we find that high-speed trains have had even less of an impact in the business-travel market.

A Lufthansa executive told Business Traveller that there has been little if any fall-off in business traffic between Paris and Frankfurt since the improved rail services started last year. Both Lufthansa and Air France continue to connect these two important business centres with up to 22 flights a day.

Why, after investing billions of euros, can’t Europe’s rail firms attract more business travellers? The main reason seems to be that Europe’s train operators are better at running these new trains than they are at marketing them. The likes of SNCF and Deutsche Bahn have been feather-bedded by billions of euros in government subsidies over the years. So one can imagine their executives don’t have the same hunger to attract business travellers that other transport enterprises have.

In addition, the UK presents a different case because, aside from Eurostar’s successful services linking London with Paris and Brussels, awareness of the best Europe can offer is low.

Michael Birtles says: “The main issue is that the product isn’t marketed at all. There’s no single source where potential travellers can receive impartial information on ticket prices.”

Unless you have an account with an efficient TMC (travel management company) or know a clued-up rail agent (and you can count these on the fingers of one hand), booking a ticket not involving Eurostar can be a real trial. Few travel agents bother with rail because of the hassle involved and poor remuneration.

Speaking from the TMCs’ point of view, Nigel Turner, director of public sector and industry affairs at CWT, says: “The integration [with the ticketing systems] isn’t there. Booking a rail ticket for a client is an offline process for our staff. They have to go off their normal systems and make a booking via the web and this adds considerably to the time taken.”

If you restrict your railway travels to Eurostar the booking and ticketing process is easy, but once you stray away from Eurostar’s network you’ll encounter confusion left, right and centre.

No European rail network has yet adopted simple e-ticketing methods in line with those used by the aviation industry. By comparison with the latter, their booking systems are antiquated and not designed for international travel. It means that anyone trying to book online faces using confusing websites with long-winded booking procedures.  

The industry’s quaint terms are another quirk. Rail tickets are described as being “non-exchangeable” which, simply put, means “cannot be changed”. When requesting an individual seat in first class with SNCF-owned Rail Europe, passengers wanting an individual seat are asked to choose an “isolated seat”. It’s enough to make you feel antisocial.

Step forward Amadeus. This major booking system, which was set up to make airline bookings, now wants a slice of the huge rail market and is working with the rail firms to improve their systems.

Amadeus can already book some rail tickets, but it wants to expand by providing agents with the technology to book all the main operators using a single neutral system. It means agents should find it easier and more lucrative to sell rail tickets. In turn, the travelling public will benefit from having access to more sales outlets.

At a recent rail conference, Gillian Gibson, vice-president of Amadeus’s multinational customer group, noted: “All rail providers seem to have different booking processes. There are no standard formats or functionality, no integrated displays and no common ticketing standards. An air booking takes an agent two minutes, a rail booking eight to ten minutes. That’s some difference.”

Any traveller brave enough to try booking a trip over the high-speed TGV Est line linking Paris with Frankfurt or Stuttgart will see what Amadeus means. After spending what seems like an age finding the right trains on each rail firm’s website, you will see that SNCF (tgv.com) and DB (bahn.de) display enormously different fares on each other’s websites, even though they are not supposed to compete with one another.

Each website shows the other’s services. When Business Traveller compared fares for peak-time high-speed trains between Paris and Frankfurt, a one-way first class ticket for a DB-operated service cost €171 when booked through bahn.de, but €128 when booked through SNCF’s site tgv.com.

Logically, you would think that Deutsche Bahn’s website would quote the best price for its own services, but in reality SNCF’s website undercut DB’s best price by 30 per cent.

Another reason why train travel hasn’t succeeded in capturing more air passengers is because they are fussy, and rail isn’t meeting their demands and needs.

Lufthansa points to the fact that the stations at Paris Est and Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (the city’s main station) need renovation and haven’t the ambience of these cities’ airports.  Granted, airports can be crowded places, but when using them at unsocial hours (as many business people must do) there’s not that intimidating feeling you might find at mainline rail stations.

Diane Bouzebiba, head of rail at Amadeus, explains: “All of a sudden [following the opening of cross-border high-speed lines] the European rail industry is having to redefine itself. Under their public-service obligations, these domestic-rail networks simply transported people from A to B, but now they’re being pushed into becoming commercial companies.

“The likes of SNCF and DB are moving into an era where high-speed rail offers a viable alternative to air travel on international routes within Europe. Yet those airline customers, which rail hopes to attract, have the same expectations of rail travel as they have of their flights. The gap in expectations [between the two travel modes] is causing pain and the rail firms are aware of this.

“Air passengers expect e-ticketing, through-ticketing and loyalty-card VIP treatment over the whole journey, but the rail firms are providing none of these benefits. Rail companies need to look at their booking channels, they also need to examine their customer strategy.”

Unlike the airlines (who treat their booking outlets more or less equally), the rail firms decide which fares they wish to provide to any booking channel. This can only cause confusion. Bouzebiba says: “DB offers Amadeus every single fare but that’s not the case with the others.”

Will matters improve? Amadeus is hopeful. It believes there is light at the end of the tunnel.

A true euro star

This operator is a shining exception. A multinational rail company, Eurostar emulates planes to provide passengers with airline-style facilities wherever it can.

It can do this because the Eurostar network is simple and compact. Through fares are available between the UK regions and the Eurostar network out of London St Pancras.

It offers a limited range of through fares into mainland Europe (with connections at Paris and Brussels) and, in particular, into Belgium and Holland. There are also special fares to dozens of cities in France, and one suspects that SNCF’s 62 per cent stake in Eurostar has a lot to do with that.

Coverage of Germany is patchy (only two cities can be booked online) while for other countries it is non-existent.

A spokesperson for the train operator says: “If a Eurostar passenger wants to go further afield then it does get more complicated, but we want to be able to extend the range of destinations passengers can book in 2009.”

Visit europeanrail.com, raileurope.co.uk, eurostar.com for more details.

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