So I guess maybe this market is to complex and there are too many institutions involved.. Maybe the only oportunity is to handle it by european laws and guidelines. There are already a few EU regulations and on that topic, most notably the one about the TAP TSI, but implementation takes a long time. The EC has announced to launch more legislation by the end of the year IIRC because they find the railway companies are not making enough progress. The real issue, by the way, is not of technical nature, but of commercial nature: Who can sell whose tickets under which conditions. Who can get access to whose data under which conditions (e.g. realtime data). But you shouldn't expect Interrail to offer a platform to book train tickets. They have enough on their hands as it is with their pass reservation platform and removing the bugs from their app. Interesting! Ok so maybe there is something going on already.. Hopefully
Of course a pass is so quickly worthwhile, it gives you so much flexibility that I would never want them to disappear. Seat reservations should be cheaper but then there’s demand so why would companies lower the prices (unfortunately) ? We’d better create new night trains. There’s demand but with the lack of carriages available and overall little rentability, I don’t think we’ll see a boom of them unless they’re subsidized. SBB and OBB want to launch night trains to Rome and Barcelona for a few years but nothing is moving as the Swiss CO2 law was rejected (there were subsidies for night trains planned), SNCF doesn’t want to cooperate and the train could only take the high-speed route from Perpignan which complicates things further. That’s what a SBB spokesperson told me recently… :/ We can dream of 2025 I guess Very profund knowledge! So maybe a european citizens initiative could change something… I mean at least SNCF could be forced to participate with OBB and so on..
Thats a very pessimistic point of view. I am pretty sure a huge amount of people would prefer a 10 hour train journey over a 1,5 hours flight. But only if its comparebly cheap or cheaper and easy to book.
So I guess maybe this market is to complex and there are too many institutions involved.. Maybe the only oportunity is to handle it by european laws and guidelines. Same as the EU did with free roaming. (btw one of the best initiatives of the EU)Maybe we need to start a european citizens initiative to force the train companys to work together! This community would be a good base to start something like this :)
Thanks for your message and help, but my issue is something more general. I’m aware of these things and how these reservations work, but I still don’t get it, why interrail is not offering a platform to book normal train trips, like you can book them on all the national train company websites? I mean this is kind of a gap in the market and without a better train connection in europe we can forget about the climate neutrality in 2050! So I guess its very important to make train booking in europe as easy, cheap and reliable as possible
So, as I understand this, it is a booking platform for seat reservations right? So you still need an interrail pass to travel… for a holiday trip this might be fine, but if you want to visit you family in spain for example from time to time, thats not very convenient and quiet expensive too I would say.
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