“Ticket for part of the route”, “Ticket not available”: if you want to travel by train to France or Spain, for example, you will quickly reach the limits of the ÖBB reservation system, especially if you do not want to travel by night train. Even if you want to take a trip to countries like Romania and Croatia, the ticket app usually tells you the final destination much earlier than planned.
Even ticketing platforms like Trainline and Omio, which want to make buying these tickets easier, are reaching their limits with too many connections. The search quickly leads to sites like “The Man in Seat 61”, a private site run by a British rail enthusiast, which provides detailed analysis of ticket purchases for virtually every route in Europe. Others even use a paper timetable to get an overview of possible routes.
Complicated booking and almost no guarantee
In the end, ideally, you end up with multiple tickets from different countries – and you have to hope the connections work as advertised, because complaints are usually only for continuous tickets. An Interrail pass is also an option – but it also offers little legal protection, and the train reservations that are often required are even more complicated to purchase than the corresponding tickets.
IMAGO As soon as several borders have to be crossed by train, things get complicated
In 2023, this will look anything but contemporary – rail companies and the EU have been promising improvements for years. It was only last autumn that EU Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans lobbied rail companies to urge movement on an app for joint ticket purchases.
Travel planning as the biggest hurdle
But it fails at the basics, says British EU policy expert and member of the German Greens, Jon Worth, in an interview with ORF.at. “It’s not just about selling tickets, it’s about planning a trip.” Only then can you think about things like buying. And just with the first and oldest problem, the time data, “we are going backwards in Europe”.
Twenty years ago, connections “even to Turkey and Syria” could be displayed on the ÖBB and Deutsche Bahn (DB) websites. However, the fact that this is no longer possible is not the fault of Deutsche Bahn and the ÖBB, says Worth. An International Union of Railways (UIC) system works in the background for timetables.
According to Worth, all state railroads are members of this association. But unlike in the past, members often do not enter more data into the system. As a result, some trains simply cannot be found on the system, although they exist. This is compounded by the fact that many private providers and regional transport companies that also provide key connections are not even owned by the UIC.
Seemingly little incentive for good data
Furthermore, access to this database system, MERITS, is extremely expensive – according to the UIC website, regularly updated timetable data costs €50,000 per year. There are alternatives, often in the form of free data that is offered directly by the respective railway companies and then used, for example, for use in Google Maps. But even these are often incomplete, as Worth says.
This is probably also due to the fact that data transfer brings very little to the railways, especially financially. If the ticket is sold on a platform other than yours, the railway company receives money, but the sales department, which takes care of sales and data maintenance, usually receives nothing.
Price comparison portal like an unprofitable dream
This also creates internal pressure within the respective companies. Selling through other companies or even comparison platforms, such as those available for flights, is therefore controversial. The virtual monopoly on tickets is much more lucrative — and the trains are usually pretty full anyway, according to Worth.
IMAGO/Natan Rubio The data situation is bad and there is almost no incentive to improve
From the passenger’s point of view, however, this does not make the train any more attractive. While it is possible to get a plane ticket between any two places in the world in minutes, booking a train is still problematic. Interest in train travel has increased enormously in recent years, as seen not only by the greatly expanded ÖBB night trains. DB also recently reported a record high in international long distance traffic.
EU postpones plans
It also called the EU – some time ago – onto the scene. In Brussels, they want to significantly simplify travel planning, for which a complicatedly named initiative for “multimodal digital mobility services” has been launched. The aim is to use one app to combine travel planning across borders and transport modes – and therefore also the train.
But even after the responsible commission deputy put pressure on Timmermans, there is still relatively little concrete on the table. According to ORF.at, the corresponding announcements were indeed planned for June, but now an EU push is apparently not expected until autumn at the earliest.
Worth also points to a stronger lobby behind the railway companies: while state railways are heavily represented in Brussels, passenger representatives play, at best, a subordinate role. The railways have moved forward with their own model, which promised a uniform solution by 2025. While there is progress in some countries, Worth considers the chances that the promised uniform reserve system will be in place by the promised date “zero”.
One of the “Most Unpleasant Issues From a Customer Perspective”
In an interview with the head of the European Union Railways Agency (ERA), Josef Doppelbauer, he pointed out to the ORF that Europe generally has access to first “let interested parties find a solution on their own”. Only then can the regulation be used to prescribe uniform tickets. In any case, he confirmed that cross-border tickets are one of the “most unpleasant problems from the customer’s point of view”, but so far there has been no progress.
Issues like this will be crucial for the rail boom of recent years to continue, not least because for customers traveling by train is usually more expensive than by plane and, depending on the distance, also involves longer travel times. At least the planning could catch up – and it mostly consists of obstacles that could be overcome without new tracks and trains.