Does a railway operator need to know about all the legs of my journey so as to offer me passenger rights?

One of the most interesting discussions provoked by my previous post about the European Commission’s passenger rights consultation was whether a railway operator really needs to know about my whole journey to be able to offer me passenger rights. Oliver Blanthorn and Cycling on Rails – two of the cleverest people I follow on Mastodon (so follow them!) – pushed me on this point, and this blog post is the result.

First of all a step back. How did we get here?

The European Commission has understood that obliging railway companies to offer a through ticket (basically: one ticket) to any destination is not going to happen. Imagine CP selling me a Lisboa – Berlin or HŽPP selling me a Zagreb – Stockholm and you see the problem.

Instead the Commission is thinking along the lines of however many tickets I have, passenger rights are still guaranteed if something goes wrong. This is the right starting point.

But then comes the pushback from the railway companies: you expect us to offer a passenger rights or reimbursements when we did not even know they were likely to be delayed in the first place, because we did not know where the passengers were coming from.

That has prompted the Commission to aim for something in between – that if a passenger has multiple tickets for their trip, these must be booked in one transaction on a ticket platform, and then the railways informed of the whole travel chain a passenger has. If a passenger had assembled the travel chain themselves (and even if minimum change times are respected) the passengers would have no rights in the case of delay or disruption.

But if we unpack this, it starts to get really complicated.

The first question, if railways have this information, can they actually act on it? In other words is there a rationale for having it?

The only railway I am aware of that theoretically uses this sort of data is Deutsche Bahn, where data on what passengers are in a given train is used to calculate if a connecting train will wait in the case of a delay. But even this does not work properly, because passengers with passes who can travel flexibly (BahnCard 100 holders for example), are not included in the data. The decision whether to hold a train (or not) at the very least needs some manual override which might well involve passengers going speaking to a train manager to inform them of their plans.

So while I see that the idea might make sense, I need more detail as to whether the data could actually used, and how, to be convinced.

The second question is: what are the downsides to any such system?

The obvious one is ticket cost. At the moment railways like SNCB, NS and DSB keep all their cheapest tickets to themselves – you have to use those railways’ booking channels to get the cheapest tickets like DSB Orange or weekend specials to the Belgian coast. The cheapest ticket for Köln – Knokke or Augsburg – Aalborg likely involves multiple tickets booked on multiple sites.

Alongside revising passenger rights legislation, the European Commission is to propose a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation (SDBTR), and that could put that issue right – you could imagine (for example) Railfinder being able to sell you a DSB Orange ticket, because DSB would be forced to make all its tickets available to third party ticket platforms.

But that is not sufficient – you would also have to harmonize booking horizons.

I faced the situation in June this year where a night train I needed in Norway was already sold out, while the connecting train in Sweden was not yet available for booking (a situation compounded by engineering works organised too late) – how could I have booked that in a single transaction? There is simply no way. But leaving me without passenger rights in that case is also absurd, as it was the railway operators causing the problem in the first place.

Elsewhere SNCF for example releases its tickets in blocks of a few months at a time, while Deutsche Bahn generally uses a rolling booking horizon. Would I need to wait for all the trains in my journey chain to be available before I could begin my booking? And were that so then likely pay more than if I had booked when tickets first became available?

Putting this another way, are European railways really going to be ready to harmonize their booking horizons – just so as to make sure information is going to be provided on passengers’ entire travel chains? Conscious of the fact that – as examined above – most railway companies cannot even act on this information even if they have it? This looks tenuous.

You could, I suppose, envisage a “bundle this” function – where a site like Railfinder or Trainline could allow a bundling of tickets after all legs were purchased, and this information could then be transmitted to railway companies. But that looks like a rather messy solution.

So in the end maybe I was wrong in my consultation submission. Perhaps the simplest solution here is that any travel chain, however it was booked, and providing minimum connection times are respected, should be accompanied by passenger rights in the case of disruption. Because any other way to do it brings downsides to passengers (extra cost) or operators (the need to harmonize booking horizons).

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Source: https://jonworth.eu/does-a-railway-operator-need-to-know-about-all-the-legs-of-my-journey-so-as-to-offer-me-passenger-rights/