The European Commission (EC) has appointed an Amadeus-led consortium to develop a pan-European information and booking system to better integrate air, road and rail services.
The ‘All Ways Travelling’ consortium, which also includes BeNe Rail, IATA, Thales, UNIFE and Germany’s Zeppelin University, will carry out a detailed study into the service, which the EC hopes will allow passengers to book tickets for trains and planes across Europe all in one place.
As well as investing in rail infrastructure, the EC is developing new systems to make it easier to book travel around the continent.
Siim Kallas, vice president of transport at the European Commission, said: “We need to develop European multi-modal journey planners in Europe.
“To make the best use of all existing transport modes and infrastructure, we need to ensure the availability, accessibility and exchange of all relevant information, such as schedules, capacity and paths.”
It is great to see the EC providing the catalyst to make rail viable addition to pan-European multi modal transport.
This is a win for rail carriers to help them open up new channels and attract new customers. Rail can sometimes be overlooked as a modal option when not available where people shop for all their other travel products like ebookers & Expedia and various other channels. When rail is not as easy booking air travel, customers are discouraged and opt for what is easiest.
This is the problem we are solving at SilverRail. We have built a platform ‘SilverCore’ that allows rail carriers to efficiently attract new customers from new channels where they are currently not present like the global Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Importantly for rail carriers they maintain full
control of pricing/availability and are able to maintain direct commercial relationship with their preferred channels to maximise value.
ebookers (Orbitz’ European brand) is the first of the global OTAs to launch rail in the UK with plans to roll out across all their European websites, powered by SilverRail Technologies.
Thanks to EC initiatives like this we should see continued innovation in rail distribution over the coming years and soon we should see rail as easy to book as air travel.