The nagging concerns over rail

While the business travel industry is welcoming what appears to be a rail renaissance, the route ahead is beset with difficulties, reports veteran travel journalist Stanley Slaughter.

The rail industry is enjoying heady times. In the UK, there has been a 43% increase in passenger numbers over the past decade, according to figures from the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOCAssociation of Train Operating Companies ) with more than 1.2bn passenger journeys every year.

On the continent it is a similar story. In 2009, according to statistics from the International Union of railways (UIC), there were 386.24bn passenger kilometres, the third highest in the world after China and India. Four major European countries, France, Germany, Italy and the UK also featured individually in the top ten.

The high speed network is growing rapidly on the continent and even Britain looks set to give the go ahead to an eventual network covering many of the major cities including Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow.  

People, including a growing number of business travellers, are choosing to travel by rail. Just this week, Eurostar, the high speed cross channel service, announced an increase in services for the summer with Nick Mercer, its commercial director, speaking of a “rail renaissance”.

Why then are there nagging doubts about the industry’s ability to seize this opportunity? In the past the rail industry has been slow in the extreme to spot, let alone embrace, commercial opportunities. The feeling persists that this could happen again.

It is only in the last few years that train operating companies (TOCs) have distinguished between business and leisure travellers. Before that everyone was just a passenger. The industry has also been slow to embrace computer bookings, corporate deals and just about any other advance offered by technology. ABTN vividly remembers being told by one TOC director that he would never offer business travellers discounts in return for volume, a scheme which is the bedrock of air travel.

Yet with the invention of the brilliant Evolvi system designed specifically for TMCs for business travellers, the number of transactions for business travellers has markedly jumped with no sign of easing off.

But there is a broader issue where the doubts are strongest. In the European rail industry, booking, reservations and ticketing systems vary from country to country. This makes international travel difficult or at least far more difficult than it needs to be. What is needed, as the industry well knows, is a standardised approach to booking and ticketing so travellers can book a single ticket from, say, London to Berlin without hassle.  

There was a move towards this goal in 2007 when a group of train operators from European countries, among them Eursotar, SNCF, Thalys and Deutsche Bahn (DB), launched Railteam. Equipped with a €30m budget, its goal was to produce a common booking platform for European rail.

The scheme was quietly dropped in late 2009 with Eurostar citing both the complexity of the concept and the then harsh economic conditions for the failure. A less sanguine view put forward by a specialist rail magazine at the time was that the Railteam people never actually managed to speak to any of the IT providers in the business.

Two years on another attempt is being made to reach some level of harmonisation. In May, the EC adopted TAP TSI (in jargonese this is the Telematics Applications for Passenger Services Technical Specifications for Interoperability).

This new move aims to oblige European rail companies to make sure they exchange relevant timetable and ticketing information. Thanks to the encouragement of UIC, this is already partly done. But the EC initiative should push it that bit further. For example, it will include information on fare structures and available seats.

2016 is seen as the likely date the improvements will start to happen. This is five years ahead. The lack of urgency is breathtaking.

Rail is booming, thanks to increasingly high speed trains and there will continue to be more and more cross-border train journeys. Yet there seems a frightening absence of energy to make it all happen quickly and work smoothly.

The challenges are clear. It is now just a four hour train journey from London to Amsterdam or Cologne. Business travellers are going to use these services and they will not want a handful of different tickets. As Mercer said this week: “In addition to a significant increase in the number of passengers taking our direct services, we’re seeing more and more passengers connect beyond Paris, Lille and Brussels.”

Trains and planes are also increasingly synchronising or complementing their services but again, as Tony Berry, HRG’s director of industry and fare distribution, pointed out in the session on rail travel at last week’s Business Travel Market, there was still no way to ticket for domestic rail and international air journeys.

With the de-regulation of rail passenger travel in the EC from last year there is a hope that the continent’s rail industry will integrate more. For example, with several train operating franchises up for tender in the UK next year, it is likely that Keolis, DB and Abellio will be among the bidders. There are persistent rumours that DB will start a London-Cologne service or that Eurostar will run a London-Brussels-Amsterdam service. There is also the possibility that TOCs will discuss code-sharing and even alliances.

This has all happened in the aviation industry. But airlines have always been far more technologically advanced and alert to commercial opportunities than rail. Rail now has an unparalleled opportunity to expand and grab a bigger share of the market, but it needs to adopt a more forceful attitude.

Hopes are not high. There is a damning indictment levelled at people who let golden chances slip by. They, it is said, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Let’s hope this never applies to the rail industry.