| Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by grahame at 10:27, 21st April 2026 |     |
From The Guardian
Almost half of EU’s busiest flight routes are ‘hard or impossible’ to book on trains – report
‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank
Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
Popular flight paths such as Lisbon-Madrid or Barcelona-Milan could not be booked from any rail operator’s website, the report found, while connections such as Paris-Rome and Amsterdam-Milan could only be booked from one of the operators.
Georgia Whitaker, a rail campaigner at T&E and author of the report, said it “almost feels a bit silly” that a clunky and outdated system was holding back climate action.
‘Stone age’ system of booking cross-border rail tickets holding back climate action by consumers, says thinktank
Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.
Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.
Popular flight paths such as Lisbon-Madrid or Barcelona-Milan could not be booked from any rail operator’s website, the report found, while connections such as Paris-Rome and Amsterdam-Milan could only be booked from one of the operators.
Georgia Whitaker, a rail campaigner at T&E and author of the report, said it “almost feels a bit silly” that a clunky and outdated system was holding back climate action.
Edit note: Typo in topic heading corrected. CfN.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by Bob_Blakey at 07:54, 22nd April 2026 | |
I would venture to suggest that this article is, at least partially, complete nonsense.
Has the author never heard of https://www.seat61.com/index.html?
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by grahame at 08:10, 22nd April 2026 | |
I would venture to suggest that this article is, at least partially, complete nonsense.
Has the author never heard of https://www.seat61.com/index.html?
Has the author never heard of https://www.seat61.com/index.html?
There is plenty of good advice on seat 61, but it's advice and not a booking system. It's a map to the most effective route to booking but you. still need to go through a whole variety of sites for many journeys and can end up with multiple window all at the same time.
The article is wrong in suggesting the system is "stone age" - it's not, but it's disjoint and takes advantage in each country, or area at times, of its own systems which the joy of modern online systems have come even more complex / disjoint for the less common journeys.
I commend to you Interrail tickets which used to slash the complexity, and often the cost. BUT ... they still do somewhat, but on so many trains there are "reservations required", "supplement payable" and "not in pass network" labels which make it more complex again, and in some cases help the train operating company make more money from journeys made by people who have already paid for a ticket. It is especially noticeable that on some trains the number of reservations / supplements available for pass holders (people who have already paid substantially for block travel) are limited, and that reservations fees do not reflect the actual cost to the company of making that reservation.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by grahame at 09:40, 22nd April 2026 | |
A follow up - NOT our plans, though similar in some ways.
Google is remarkable in many ways. I asked SN12 7NY, Spa Rd, Melksham to Aurillac, France for tomorrow and got
BUT - I don't trust Google to allow enough connection time - especially in London (St Pancras) at the moment, and the sting is in the tail:
Tickets and information
Eurostar - Ticket information - 00 32 2 400 67 76
Faresaver
GWR - Ticket information - 0345 700 0125
RATP - Buy tickets
RER - Buy tickets
SNCF Voyageurs - 00 33 1 84 94 36 35
TER Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes - Ticket information - 00 33 9 69 32 21 41
Transport for London
Île-de-France Mobilités - Transport Data Producer and Transport Authority
Eurostar - Ticket information - 00 32 2 400 67 76
Faresaver
GWR - Ticket information - 0345 700 0125
RATP - Buy tickets
RER - Buy tickets
SNCF Voyageurs - 00 33 1 84 94 36 35
TER Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes - Ticket information - 00 33 9 69 32 21 41
Transport for London
Île-de-France Mobilités - Transport Data Producer and Transport Authority
Any of those items include links to web sites ... but Utopia would be a single "I want to book that" link, and a promise / guarantee that if a connection missed you would have a safety net.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by eXPassenger at 19:16, 22nd April 2026 | |
I am chary of Google after I asked it (search not maps) for bus times to Weston SM on 14 April and was told there were no buses as it was a Sunday.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by Chris from Nailsea at 19:31, 22nd April 2026 | |
Weston super Mare generally closes on a Sunday - it's in rural Somerset.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by eightonedee at 21:04, 22nd April 2026 | |
I'm with Bob B on this one. There's plenty of booking sites on the web, and if you Google "Train tickets from Paris to Madrid" or something similar several come up. There's no excuse for not being able to compare deals on popular routes, and even if there are two or more "tickets" required, my experience is that you can buy all stages through the same outlet in one transaction. I've also never heard of any archaeologists finding remains of a laptop with unsuccessful ticket searches on its hard drive when excavating Neolithic sites!
My wife and I are going back to Aachen in June, and this year (as last) SNCB "won" with the best deal from St Pancras and I have been able to buy and download tickets for all stages at the same time.
The Greenpeace report also quoted in the same Guardian article is also a somewhat poor piece of work. It blames the sometimes (but far from invariable) price premium for cross-border train fares over air fares on unfair advantages given to cut-price airlines. It fails to mention that the big drawback of rail travel, namely that it takes far longer to cover the distance. Much as I enjoy train travel and watching the countryside passing and changing as a journey proceeds (especially now I am retired), if you are working and trying to use valuable holiday allowance time to go away, or someone travelling on work that wants to get home in good time to see his family before bedtime, you will choose the plane unless the time to get to and from the airport(s) and check-in time eats up the time savings, even if it costs more.
The Greenpeace report also contains some interesting statements and recommendations. It repeats the statement about buying different tickets for different stages of the journey being a barrier, claims that Norway has "a relatively dense rail network", and suggests that more high-speed rail networks are needed (must have forgotten their call for HS2 to be abandoned in 2021..) including one from Madrid to Rome. Get out your atlases, folks and see if you an work out what the problem is for that last one. I don't suppose that their members in the Maritime Alps, Livorno, Spezia or Pisa will be happy with the idea, but fortunately for them I don't think anyone looking at the economic case would be either.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by eXPassenger at 18:18, 23rd April 2026 | |
Weston super Mare generally closes on a Sunday - it's in rural Somerset. 
I agree but 14 April this year was a Tuesday, if Google could not get the day of the week correct I would have little confidence in its understanding of bus timetables.
| Re: Difficulty of booking international rail tickets Posted by grahame at 11:34, 1st May 2026 | |
Excellent article at https://europeanrailtimetable.eu/blogs/travel-articles/europe-s-rail-ticketing-mess
Europe’s Rail Ticketing Mess: Why Booking a Train Still Feels Harder Than Flying
The European Union likes to present rail as the backbone of a sustainable transport future. Yet, as an April 2026 report from think tank Transport & Environment makes clear, the reality of booking a train across Europe remains fragmented, opaque, and often frustrating. The core problem is not a lack of infrastructure or even demand—it is a failure of the ticketing system to match the expectations of modern travellers.
A System That Discourages Its Own Use
At its most basic level, the European rail ticketing system fails to do what passengers expect: allow them to book a journey from A to B in one go. On some of the EU’s busiest corridors, one in five international rail journeys cannot be booked as a single ticket through major operator platforms.
The problem worsens with distance. For journeys above 900 km, more than half cannot be booked end-to-end via incumbent operators. This is precisely where rail should be competing most strongly with aviation. Instead, it is here that the system breaks down.
Passengers notice. Surveys show that 61% of long-distance travellers have abandoned rail journeys because booking is too complex and booking a train can take up to 70% longer than booking a flight. In an era where convenience defines consumer choice, this is a critical failure.
The European Union likes to present rail as the backbone of a sustainable transport future. Yet, as an April 2026 report from think tank Transport & Environment makes clear, the reality of booking a train across Europe remains fragmented, opaque, and often frustrating. The core problem is not a lack of infrastructure or even demand—it is a failure of the ticketing system to match the expectations of modern travellers.
A System That Discourages Its Own Use
At its most basic level, the European rail ticketing system fails to do what passengers expect: allow them to book a journey from A to B in one go. On some of the EU’s busiest corridors, one in five international rail journeys cannot be booked as a single ticket through major operator platforms.
The problem worsens with distance. For journeys above 900 km, more than half cannot be booked end-to-end via incumbent operators. This is precisely where rail should be competing most strongly with aviation. Instead, it is here that the system breaks down.
Passengers notice. Surveys show that 61% of long-distance travellers have abandoned rail journeys because booking is too complex and booking a train can take up to 70% longer than booking a flight. In an era where convenience defines consumer choice, this is a critical failure.
I am aware that many Coffee Shop members are very used to the systems and networks, and have disagreed with me before when I suggest it's hard to work out and book. I feel somewhat vindicated by some of the stats above, and indeed at times spend many hours (with, I will admit, perverse enjoyment) working things out through multiple sources and platforms.
I am headed next week from home to Antwerp ... and it's far from as easy as simply swiping a card in at Melksham Station and out when I get to Antwerp ...
