The European Commission has presented a legislative package that forces large railway operators to open their sales platforms to other companies. And Renfe, the main operator in Spain, is in the spotlight.
Platforms. Buying a train ticket in Europe continues to be, in many cases, an odyssey. Especially when the trip crosses borders or involves combining different operators. The European Commission esteem that on average it takes 70% longer to book a train journey than to do the same with a flight.
And part of the blame lies with the large historical operators, such as Renfe in Spain, Deutsche Bahn in Germany or SNCF in France, which control their own sales platforms and have few incentives to give visibility to their rivals.
What exactly does Brussels propose? The Commission has presented a legislative package that directly targets this dominant position. The rule obliges any operator that has a market share equal to or greater than 50% in the national railway market to open its digital ticket sales platform to other companies that request it. In practice, whoever enters the Renfe website should also be able to see the Iryo and Ouigo tickets, not just the Renfe ones. The same would happen in the rest of the countries with their own dominant operators.
But not only that. Large operators will also have to share your ratesdiscounts and schedules dynamically and in real time with travel agencies and digital platforms such as Booking, Omio, Trainline, eDreams, and must do so under fair and non-discriminatory commercial conditions. Until now, according to the Commission itself, these platforms only had access to the most expensive rates, not the complete catalog.
Why Renfe is in the center. It is not the first time that the Spanish operator appears in this debate. In 2023, the European Commission opened a formal investigation to assess whether Renfe could have abused its dominant position in the Spanish market by refusing to provide its real-time data to competing ticketing platforms, according to share from El Diario. The new regulation would settle this type of situation generally for all of Europe.
The Commission emphasize that the operators with greater brand recognition, the heirs of the old railway monopolies, have become the usual reference for the traveler, which gives them a structural advantage to exclude competition from their ecosystem.
The other side of the coin. The change is not only against Renfe in Spain. And if the Spanish operator must open its platform to Iryo and Ouigo, it would also have the right to have its tickets appear on the dominant websites of other countrieslike SNCF Connect in France (as much as it has resisted until now). That could facilitate its expansion in the European market.
Even so, the impact for historical operators is double and not at all comfortable. And just as they point out in El País, on the one hand, they must show their commercial strategy in advance to their direct competitors. On the other hand, more competition in ticket sales increases pressure on margins and commissions.
The single ticket, the great novelty for the traveler. Along with the opening of platforms, the Commission proposes to create a single ticket that covers routes operated by different companies in a single transaction. A trip from Madrid to Brussels with Renfe, SNCF and SNCB would have a single document. And if there is a delay in one of the sections, the passenger would be covered, since the company responsible for the incident assumes the assistance, the transportation alternative and the corresponding financial compensation.
There is an important nuance: if the problem is not caused by the train but rather that whoever sold the ticket did not respect the minimum connection times, the responsibility falls on the sales platform, which must refund the entire ticket and compensate the passenger. up to 75% of its price.
What happens now? This proposal is, for now, just that, a proposal. The negotiation still remains to be concluded between the Commission, the European Parliament and the Member States. If the process progresses without major obstacles, Brussels estimates that the changes could be operational in less than twelve months from the entry into force of the regulation. The European Commissioner for Transport, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, was one of those in charge of presenting the initiative together with the executive vice-president Raffaele Fitto, counting that “we went from building networks to serving passengers.”
Cover image | Jose Garcia
In Xataka | If the question is what Renfe can do to stop Ouigo and Iryo, the answer is not in the prices
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