Customer-centric rail: closing the passenger journey gap

Europe’s railways have rarely run better trains. They keep losing passengers in the gaps between them.

A passenger books a journey, not a train. Yet the moment a trip crosses an operator, a border or a ticketing system, the railway starts to lose them: in the connection that does not hold, the ticket that cannot be bought in one place, the information that never arrives when something goes wrong. The European Passengers’ Federation puts it starkly: a traveller is around ten times more likely to abandon the booking of an international rail journey than the equivalent flight.

Customer-centric rail: integrating the fragmented passenger journey follows the passenger across every stage of the trip, from the European Commission’s 13 May passenger package and the argument over what a “single ticket” should really mean, to Switzerland’s one-card network, Korea’s whole-journey app and the connectivity that now underpins the on-board experience.

You will learn:

• Why passengers judge the whole journey rather than the train and where rail loses them between operators
• How the 13 May passenger package changes protection for multi-operator journeys and where it still falls short
• Why the biggest gains now lie in ticketing, information and the first and last mile rather than raw speed
• How on-board connectivity has moved from a passenger perk to part of the railway’s infrastructure

With contributions from Josef Schneider and Delphine Grandsart (European Passengers’ Federation), Mohamed Mezghani (UITP), Emmanuelle Scemama (Eurostar), Alberto Mazzola (CER), Kristina Meidė (LTG Link), Matthias Bütler (SBB), Alain Resplandy-Bernard (SNCF Gares & Connexions) and Paul Vaclik (Nomad Digital), with a global vantage point from South Korea’s Korail.

This Track Insights report is published in association with Nomad Digital.

Read the report to see what it takes to turn a fragmented network into one journey the passenger can trust.