Ventimiglia: Passengers change trains at this Ligurian border station because the French and Italian networks meet here and their ticketing systems do not. Miss the connection and you discover that you hold two contracts rather than one, and that neither operator owes you very much. The Commission proposed a fix in May. It has not become law.
The package tabled on 13 May contains three regulations aimed at the same failure. Rail ticketing across Europe works well within borders and poorly across them, because operators own their distribution data and share it grudgingly. A traveller booking Hamburg to Barcelona typically assembles the journey from separate purchases on separate websites, each with its own conditions and its own definition of what happens when something breaks.
The first regulation obliges operators to make real-time timetable, availability and fare data available to third-party retailers on fair commercial terms. The second creates a framework for through-tickets, so that a multi-operator journey sold as one product carries one set of obligations. The third extends passenger rights to the whole journey rather than to each leg separately, which is the provision passengers would actually notice. Under it, a delay on the first leg that causes a missed connection on the second becomes the seller’s problem.
Incumbent operators have objected in familiar terms. They argue that mandated data sharing undermines investment in their own booking platforms, that through-ticket liability exposes them to costs arising from another company’s delays, and that the compensation regime should not apply where they had no operational control. Newer open-access operators and ticket retailers support the package, which tells you roughly where each firm sits in the market.
The technical dispute concerns which data standard prevails. European rail runs on a mixture of legacy formats and the sector’s own specifications, and the Commission’s proposal leans on open interfaces rather than mandating one system. That avoids picking a winner and creates an obvious route to slow compliance, because an operator that publishes data in an awkward format has technically complied while remaining effectively closed.
Parliament and Council have started work but the file is early. Transport ministers discussed it in June without concluding, and the Parliament’s transport committee has not voted a report. Nothing binding will apply before 2028 on the most optimistic reading, and the high-speed rail plan the Commission launched last November assumes a booking layer that this package is supposed to build.
That sequencing matters. Europe is planning new high-speed corridors and faster cross-border services while the commercial plumbing that would let passengers buy a single journey across them remains a legislative proposal. The Commission’s own framing treats ticketing as an enabler of modal shift from aviation. An enabler that arrives after the infrastructure it is meant to serve is a weaker instrument than one that arrives with it.
