Von der Leyen’s second attempt at single-ticket rail travel

European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen promised single-ticket rail travel across the continent in her re-election pitch to the European Parliament, but a similar initiative in her previous five-year term never saw the light of day.

Passengers travelling by train across different European countries often have to buy separate tickets from different operators. They have no protection if the first train is late or cancelled and they miss their connection.

“Cross-border train travel is still too difficult for many citizens,” von der Leyen wrote in her political guidelines, a document that accompanied her 18 July re-election speech to European parliamentarians.

To overcome this, von der Leyen announced that the Commission would propose a new Regulation on Single Digital Booking and Ticketing so that “Europeans can buy one single ticket on one single platform and get passengers’ rights for their whole trip”.

While this sounds promising, it will not be the Commission’s first attempt.

Derailed

In December 2020, the Commission’s ‘Sustainable & Smart Mobility Strategy’ committed to issuing recommendations to “support the development of multimodal ticketing services, together with an initiative on ticketing, including rail ticketing”.

That led to the proposed Multimodal Digital Mobility Services Regulation (MDMS), which would have allowed Europeans to buy one single ticket for an entire cross-border journey.

The Commission consulted the public on the proposal from December 2021 to February 2022. However more than two years later, the MDMS proposal has not been approved by the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, an internal Commission quality-checking service that advises Commissioners on whether legislative proposals are fit for purpose.

The Board’s 2023 Annual Report, published in March 2024, stated only that its work on the MDMS is ‘ongoing’. According to a published list of meetings, the Board has not discussed the MDMS since September 2023.

Victor Thévenet, rail policy manager at NGO Transport & Environment (T&E), told Euractiv there were two possibilities on the table in the initial MDMS proposal: establishing an independent booking platform with access to all data that would sell the tickets of different operators including combined tickets, or merely a search platform that would communicate the separate offers on sale.

Asked for an update on the file after von der Leyen’s speech, a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv that MDMS is “a complex file requiring a lot of technical work, which has continued throughout this mandate and has not yet concluded”. The Commission declined to provide further detail.

Carlos Ambel, a senior director at T&E, wrote in a blog post in September 2023 that “(then) Transport Commissioner Valean delayed the publication, making it impossible to be adopted before the end of the parliamentary term”.

“She tried to push for a less ambitious proposal which would not allow independent booking platforms to sell the tickets of rail incumbents but just show the connection,” he argued.

According to Ambel, this was due to lobbying by rail operators, who “fear that they will lose revenues from the distribution of tickets and that it will put new rail entrants in the spotlight”.

The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) would not comment on Ambel’s assertions. However, CER did share similar concerns with Euractiv in a June 2023 article.

Alberto Mazzola, CER’s executive director, said that while the rail industry supports measures to improve international ticketing, this “shouldn’t be at the expense of the transport operators”.

“Railway undertakings operate on small margins with high fixed costs, so any regulatory intervention that decreases those margins will potentially result in diminishing services, with a negative impact on passengers,” he said at the time.

CER recently told Euractiv it is working on an IT tool that would “technically harmonise rail ticket distribution and is enabling multimodality”, known as the Open Sales and Distribution Model (OSDM), which has already been implemented in Sweden.

Unlike von der Leyen’s recent announcement, which focused on rail only, the MDMS proposal combined various transport modes. It was intended to ease ticket booking but also make it easier to compare different travel options and plan routes.

It remains to be seen whether the Commission will now focus solely on von der Leyen’s slimmed-down proposal focused on rail, or whether it will try to resurrect the MDMS.

[Edited by Donagh Cagney/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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