The comission is planning changes to train travel in Europe to make it less of a headache for passengers.
-Single booking tickets that work across different operators.
-Passenger safety nets such as reroutings, reimbursements and compensations.
-New rules for operators and platforms to ensure fair pricings and route options.
I know it’s not perfect, but I kind-of feel that Interrail is already pretty close. I know it’s meant for tourists and some operators have stand-alone booking systems, but it’s universally accepted and pretty effortless for the end user.
Interrail is a very good idea, but way too expensive; unless you perfectly plan out your trip you’re most certainly better off flying or paying for normal train rides. It can definitely be cheaper, but you’re going through 2 months of planning out the proper travel plan for that to happen.
But it might be more expensive than it should be for those tickets and it limits the days traveling through your own country in outbound and inbound days. Not optimal for someone living near borders and still interrail often doesn’t even have seat reservation. This needs to be booked through a different portal. Also private train operators are often not included at all which is another downside
Just based on the headline it’s nit that much different from what we get now. We already get compensated on missed connections for cross country bookings and although I get multiple tickets, I can have one booking for a long trip.
Price and reliability have been the biggest hurdles.
It is very different from now, but it will take more time to become reality I guess. The compensation is just the nice to have. The core is that operators will be forced to open up their booking systems make them accessible so that unified booking platforms are made possible, if necessary by force. That would be a game changer. After all the booking systems exist, but rail companies are guarding them, hence the lack of interoperability.
Price and reliability do matter but don’t underestimate the role that booking and finding stuff makes. If you have to call somewhere, or worse, even go to an office somewhere to book a train trip, this is turning off a lot of people from even considering that option. Of course, things have become a lot better, gradually, over the years and on many trips one can book nowadays online but the offer is very splintered and very incomplete.
We already get compensated on missed connections for cross country bookings
Where do you book? Afaik this is not a thing everywhere
Better connection across non-major countries would be quite useful. Last time I was there it was still more plausible to pass to Slovenia from Italy via bus.
Slovenia is a very unreachable country. I remember last time I went the bus from Milan was 30€, which is not a bad price. A train would be nice, but not high priority. It would be good if they actually got any flights actually landing there.
And funding for transitious, right? No reliance on proprietary garbage?
Ursula going beyond her mandate again?
Maybe she should start being held accountable, she’s done enough damage.
orly? can you hop on a train in Germany and go to Romania? don’t think so.
That’s the problem that needs solving: infrastructure. Then you come with the tickets.
All this is just money laundering.
Of course you can. On bahn.de it showed me a connection (from Bonn to Bucuresti tomorrow) which would take 33 hours, and booking is not possible. On oebb.at it would take 28 hours, and I could book two tickets for the complete journey. I tried another day, and there oebb.at could only sell me a ticket for a part of the journey, so I would need to get back to bahn.de an book the other part there.
What a weirdly specific hill to die on. There’s direct trains from Bucharest to - off the top of my head - Czechia, Poland, Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Ukraine… but none to Germany, so just burn the whole fucking thing down.
Also the point is you would be able to book a Berlin - Romania train. Yes, with a change in Czechia, but it would be a single ticket with compensation for missed connections, much like a flight.
Wont happen
Maybe the goal is a bit ambitious yes. But at least it’s promising that the Commission has recognized some very real issues with train travel in Europe and announced they are drafting a plan to fix them.
Going across several countries by train and then experiencing a delay that disrupts your entire schedule is a miserable experience. You’re left having to contact several rail operators’ customer support channels (some of which barely offer service in a language you understand), just to maybe try and patch up your trip.
I hope that, at the very least, they manage to implement some sort of one-ticket solution with a decent safety net.
The EU is a slow moving train, at least when the roof isn’t already burning (in which case it can move a lot faster, even if still slower than nation states). The incredible complexity of the topic and centuries of fragmented history in the business don’t help either. But we should not confuse glacial speed with nothing happening. The EU is working on harmonising railways in a lot of different ways and some have already made a meaningful difference. Interoperatibility has generally improved. New projects are constructed generally according to pan-European standards etc. The booking issue is a tough nut to crack but from the recent news I take it that even the Commission is loosing patience and ready to unpack harsher instruments towards railway operators. On one side that helps them “motivate” to find proper solutions on their own, and if not, then doing it the hard way.
I currently work in IT at Deutsche Bahn and yesterday we were already discussing possible changes resulting from this.
