Almost half of EU’s busiest flight routes are ‘hard or impossible’ to book on trains – report

Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.

Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.

Popular flight paths such as Lisbon-Madrid or Barcelona-Milan could not be booked from any rail operator’s website, the report found, while connections such as Paris-Rome and Amsterdam-Milan could only be booked from one of the operators.

Georgia Whitaker, a rail campaigner at T&E and author of the report, said it “almost feels a bit silly” that a clunky and outdated system was holding back climate action.

“In the world we live in you can get pretty much most things, for better or worse, with one click,” she said. “When you can’t do that to travel by rail – despite people’s best intentions – we are not going to see the full potential being utilised.”

Aviation is one of the toughest sectors of the economy to clean up with technological solutions, and its emissions of planet-heating gas are set to soar as the industry seeks to double its passenger traffic by 2050.

The analysts looked at the ease of buying train tickets on the 30 busiest international air routes within the EU – excluding trips to islands and routes longer than 1,500km – and found passengers could not buy tickets that covered the whole journey on 20% of them. Tickets were only available from one of the train operators on a further 27% of the routes.

The disparity was slightly worse for a broader dataset of 50 international routes that captured European countries with quieter airspace.

“This report exposes a ‘stone age’ system where major operators often fail to even display – let alone sell – available cross-border connections or cheaper competitor fares,” said Brian Caulfield, a transport researcher at Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in the report.

“We are making it structurally difficult for even the most climate-conscious travellers to choose the greener option.”

Passengers tend to book tickets from the websites of the dominant operator in their country, such as Deutsche Bahn in Germany or SNCF in France. Across Europe, the report found incumbent operators do not sell competitors’ tickets on 86% of routes where competition exists, while on 59% of the routes, the alternative is not even displayed.

Last year, a YouGov poll commissioned by T&E found that 61% of long distance rail travellers have avoided journeys because of the difficulty in booking a ticket. More than 40% said they would travel more often by rail if it were easier to book tickets.

“One of the barriers to travelling by rail is price because often it is more expensive than flying,” said Whitaker. “But what’s happening as a result of not displaying or selling other competitive services on the same routes is that often passengers are not aware of the fact that there are actually cheaper options.”

The European Commission plans to publish a single ticketing package on 13 May as part of a promise to allow Europeans to travel across the continent more easily and enjoy consumer protections as they do so.

The findings build on a Greenpeace report in August that examined 109 cross-border routes in Europe and found trains beat planes on price on just 39% of routes.

Herwig Schuster, a rail campaigner at Greenpeace, said the new T&E report was a valuable contribution ahead of the single ticketing rules. “When choosing between rail and plane for short-haul journeys, many people prioritise price. However, if they find it too complicated to purchase the necessary train tickets, they will opt for the more polluting flight.”