Only EU law is going to solve cross border rail ticketing problems

French state owned rail operator SNCF will not sell me tickets for Italian state owned rail operator Trenitalia’s trains.

Trenitalia will not sell me tickets for SNCF’s trains.

But in Brussels both Trenitalia and SNCF want to have you believe that a rail industry initiative called the CER Ticketing Roadmap will mean that from 2025 rail passengers will be better able to book rail tickets Europe wide. The solution the Roadmap proposes is a single standard for data exchange – OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model) – and that is meant to solve the problems customers face.

Except it will not.

Trenitalia could sell SNCF’s tickets right now, and SNCF could sell Trenitalia’s (and indeed both used to!)

The reason they do not do so is not technical but political – they do not want to, and there is no obligation on them to do so, so they don’t.

No technical standard – OSDM or any other – is going to fix that.

My aim is simple – it is to allow passengers to book tickets across Europe by train seamlessly and easily. Easier booking should mean more passengers, and hence fewer passengers on other more polluting modes like cars and planes. And it should help railways’ bottom line as well.

I do not care if SNCF or Trenitalia, or Deutsche Bahn or Trainline or Rail Europe or someone else can offer this seamless ticket selling service to me, but I need at least one platform (and ideally more than one!) with all of Europe’s trains for sale on it. The only way to achieve this is to introduce a data sharing obligation on all rail operators. Whether large or small, state or private, an operator’s entire ticketing inventory must be shared with anyone who wants it, and on fair terms to allow that reseller to make a small profit from the sale.

The CER Ticketing Roadmap and OSDM do not include any such data sharing obligation, and so do not solve the problem.

And then even if I could manage to purchase a Berlin-Barcelona or a Nice-Lisboa trip in one transaction, as a customer at the moment I do not have full passenger rights, because my trip would be with multiple operators. Industry initiatives like AJC and Railteam are not rights – they are based on the good will of railway companies towards their passengers, and are fiendishly hard to use. If my trip by train is already longer and more costly than on other modes, and I face the danger of being stranded and out of pocket for a hotel night if something goes wrong, that’s a hell of a hard sell to persuade a possible new customer!

No industry initiative is going to help enough on this point either.

This is why nothing short of a new legal framework EU-wide is going to help. And we might just get a proposal for that in 2025.

If you do not understand these basic points by now you are either ignorant, or you are an industry apologist.