The EU’s fresh proposal to make the booking of complicated European rail journeys easier and more reliable, and in just one click, is a gift to travellers – but could be a major headache for the large companies that run the trains.
Make no mistake: a major political battle lies ahead. If politicians love the idea of simplifying the travel of EU citizens, the railway sector has already made clear it’s ready to wage war to defend its interests.
The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER), which represents the industry in Brussels, has slammed the European Commission’s proposals as “unprecedented and unjustified regulatory interventionism”.
Panic stations
Their rage isn’t merely focused on the extra protections attached to the “one journey, one ticket” policy that the EU wants to force on the sector, even when the journey involves multiple trains with different operators.
The proposals unveiled on Wednesday also promise compensation or re-routing for passengers if they miss a connection due to a delay. This would result in higher prices, CER claimed.
And there’s more. Large national rail operators will be obliged to enter agreements with online ticketing platforms, and be obliged to sell tickets for competing services through their own websites.
The first measure would “remove leeway from railways in commercial negotiations”, CER said. The second would, we are told, destroy the “entrepreneurial autonomy of operators” and stifle innovation.
Jumping the barrier
It’s unlikely that the dare status of Europe’s national ticketing services will help CER in its battle.
If a French citizen wants to travel from Paris to a city in central Italy by train this summer, he or she would not be able to book the Italian legs of his trip on the website of his national operator SNCF.
The latest EU proposal, however, would not change the situation much unless SNCF’s ticketing platform decides to ask Trenitalia for the right to sell the tickets of its Italian operations.
The law would, in fact, empower any online platform – including those of SNCF and Trenitalia – to sell other companies’ ticket. The legacy giants’ obligation to make space for competitors on their ticketing websites would, instead, only apply at the national market level.
In this fragmented landscape, a popular British rail-booking website is already bridging the gap.
Free to roam
The Big Rail lobby can probably count on little sympathy from the European Parliament. The lobby group only needs to ask airlines about the ongoing battle between MEPs and governments in the Council of the EU over air passenger rights.
Ever on the lookout for a genuinely popular intervention from Brussels, Parliament wants to force carriers to allow passengers to carry luggage on board free of charge, and bolster compensation for delays.
Jens Gieseke, transport policy lead in the conservative European People’s Party, has already broadly endorsed the Commission’s proposals, equating the “one ticket” idea to the popular EU law that outlawed mobile phone roaming charges in the EU.
Social democrat and, in particular, Green lawmakers are determined in simplify international rail travel to help boost eco-friendly train transport as a convenient alternative to short-haul flights.
Intercity
European capitals may well find themselves on the other side of the argument, however, obliged to defend the perceived interests of gigantic national rail companies that employ a large and often militant workforce. So will the fur inevitably fly when the parliamentary negotiators lock horns with Council?
The biggest open question is what Paris, Berlin, Rome and others will decide to be in their best interests: protect their national champions by scotching the legislation, or use it as a launchpad to challenge competitors in neighbouring countries.
Either way, there is going to be a lot of lobbying on both sides of the argument. Not all champions of European rail travel are convinced by the proposals in their current form.
Jon Worth, and independent commentator on EU railway policy, told Euractiv that the Commission proposals were “radical” and “unworkable”, and that both Parliament and the Council will likely change them.
“An obligation on incumbent platforms to sell their rivals’ tickets will cause frustration in the HQs of Deutsche Bahn and SNCF, but the likes of Flix and European Sleeper will be happy,” he said.
“Overall it seems the Commission only had in mind someone who travels internationally on a train once a year for their summer holidays when they were drafting this,” Worth said.
(rh, aw)
