Bundling trip planning and ticketing together – it’s not in the passengers’ interest

A train trip between small or medium sized towns at opposite ends of France by train normally works like this: TER regional train to the nearest city, TGV at high speed across the country, and then a TER for the last leg.

So let’s take a worked example – Haguenau (population 36000, 30km from Strasbourg) to Arcachon (population 11000, 55km from Bordeaux).

This is what SNCF Connect suggests for this trip, for the test date 18 February – 3 options, 2 bookable as 1 is full:

Try this on any of the rivals in French ticket sales – 1.2.Train, Omio, Kombo and Trainline – and you get more or less the same (and definitely not more options):

But by now anyone with some sort of knowledge of French geography and France’s rail network will be thinking “hang on, why not go via Paris?”

Turn to, errr, Deutsche Bahn (yes, using the German rail company’s planner!) and that’s what is suggested – loads of trains!

We have the options with 2 changes we also found at SNCF Connect et al in here, but a slew of options with 3 changes – all the ones with an arrow in the middle require a transfer between Paris terminals (Est to Montparnasse).

The problem: SNCF’s own searches cannot ever show you connections involving more than two changes. And – importantly – this limitation in SNCF’s system is just passed straight across to the resellers like Trainline and 1.2.Train.

So let’s break down a three change option manually.

If we take the 12:09 departure from Haguenau we get prices for each leg as follows:
Haguenau-Strasbourg – €9,30
Strasbourg-Paris Est – €29
Paris Montparnasse-Bordeaux St Jean – €51
Bordeaux St Jean-Arcachon – €13,80
(you also need to add €2,50 for the metro ticket across Paris from Est to Montparnasse – that you need to buy in a separate app or online)

Total: €105.60 – a little cheaper and much faster than the cheapest option offered by SNCF Connect, and a good bit cheaper than the best offers from any other platform.

What is happening here?

None of these sites that can sell a Haguenau – Arcachon ticket is correctly separating route planning from ticket sales. All of them query the SNCF API that returns a result that is “maximum 2 changes, that’s it, that is all we will show you”. Deutsche Bahn by contrast shows all reasonable routes, but then cannot sell tickets for those routes (which given it’s a German site is sort of understandable).

It would be theoretically possible for a site like Trainline or 1.2.Train to do this better – to realise the limits of the SNCF systems and somehow find a way around them (perhaps 2 transactions – Haguenau-Strasbourg-Paris-Bordeaux, and Bordeaux-Arcachon separately?) but either something in SNCF’s terms or SNCF’s API prevents this, or a lack of human or technological resources in these companies is the limit.

Anyway, whatever the reasons are, the conclusion here is clear: before you even come to ticket sales, you need a good route – so seeing route planning and sales somewhat separately is a good thing. Something to bear in mind for the forthcoming EU Ticketing Regulation.

The post Bundling trip planning and ticketing together – it’s not in the passengers’ interest appeared first on Jon Worth.

Source: https://jonworth.eu/bundling-trip-planning-and-ticketing-together-its-not-in-the-passengers-interest/