Trains, planes and automobiles

The early history of railways was all about fierce rivalry, whether that was with the then-dominant canal companies or other railway companies trying to beat their competitors to build out their networks. Some even went as far as hiring gunfighters to beat the competition.

These days, things are a lot more civilised and rail companies are working hand in hand with other companies who might be considered their bitter rivals – airlines, taxis and even electric scooter fleets – to get people from door to door.

Jason Geall, vice president Northern Europe for American Express Global Business Travel, says, “We are seeing some interesting new partnerships, often with historic competitors coming together to work as collaborators, to provide more integrated travel experiences. These initiatives are being driven by changing traveller behaviour and expectations, and social and economic trends – for example, the rising importance of topics such as sustainable travel and traveller wellbeing.”

Trains and planes
On long-haul routes, rail companies and airlines are starting to realise that rather than trying to drive each other out of business on certain key routes, working together might actually be a better answer.

SNCF and Air France work together on their Air&Rail programme which offers benefits that are typically only offered to business travellers on interlining airlines, such as combined bookings, guaranteed seats on later services and loyalty miles.

TGV Air services are available from 14 French cities including Lille, Strasbourg and Lyon to Charles de Gaulle. There are also services linking Paris and Brussels as well as Amsterdam with Brussels and Antwerp.

Amex GBT’s Geall believes this works when rail companies offer “an air-like experience”. He says, “One passenger name record can include flight plus a dedicated train or carriage, with comfort and service levels that replicate the aircraft cabin experience.”

In Germany, Lufthansa are offering ‘flights’ between Frankfurt and Cologne that are bookable via the Amadeus GDS air display but which are actually rail services operated by Deutsche Bahn.

Others are looking at similar partnerships. NS Dutch Railways, Thalys and KLM were due to start cooperating on the Brussels-Amsterdam Schiphol route at the end of March this year but this has now been delayed because of the coronavirus crisis.

The partnership would see KLM reduce the number of flights on the route from five to four flights a day, in combination with an improved Air&Rail product aboard the Thalys.

The airline said it planned to gradually cut back the number of flights between Brussels and Schiphol but with KLM’s summer schedule – along with those of other airlines – now ripped up, the plans to work together have been postponed.

“As soon as we can leave the coronavirus crisis behind, we will start building again,” said an airline spokeswoman. “Expanding our collaboration with rail service providers is a very important part of our sustainability program Fly Responsibly. We need to cooperate with other parties because KLM wants to create a sustainable future for aviation, but cannot do this alone. Our objective is to replace more short distance flights in the future, ie. to London, by train.”

Heathrow Express, which runs frequent fast rail services between Paddington station in London and Heathrow Airport, has a long-standing and “incredibly successful” partnership with Aer Lingus, according to the train operator’s sales manager Richard Young.

Heathrow Express tickets are available in the booking workflow of aerlingus.com where passengers flying into Heathrow are automatically offered a Heathrow Express ticket as an ancillary product.

Young says Heathrow Express has launched a new API which will give the company a lot more flexibility and functionality to work with partners. “One of our objectives is to try and get into our partners’ booking workflows as early in the process as we possibly can whether that is airlines or hotels,” he says.

Bertrand Blais, vice president of product management at Amex GBT-owned KDS, says, “You will see more and more agreements between airlines and rail companies for short journeys. There is a financial interest for airlines because short-haul flights are difficult to make profitable.”

He adds that one challenge is that integrating rail and air requires innovation in payment, making sure that providers of different segments offered by different providers get paid, something that KDS has achieved.

Another stumbling block is the commercial benefits of the deal. “The majority of our customers don’t want corporate bundles because they have their own programmes with specific suppliers,” says Blais.

Trains and automobiles
Heathrow Express has also been looking at how it can work with ground transportation companies. Two summers ago, the train operator ran a pilot called Onwards Travel which looked at how to integrate the rail journey and a private transfer by taxi in a single, seamless journey.

Following the successful pilot, the company has now issued an RFP to a mixture of private hire taxi companies and ride-hailing companies – which BTN Europe understands includes Uber – with a winning bidder to be announced this spring.

“We have identified corporates as being a potential market for the product,” says Young. “It would be my hope that corporate companies see this as being not just a time-saving method of getting to and from the airport but also a cost saving.”

Young says it will also help the environment. “We see this as being an important part of limiting the number of car journeys to and from the airport,” he says. The airport has made a commitment that 55% of the journeys to it would be made by public transport by 2030.

Collaborations between rail and car providers are not a new thing. In 2015, Lufthansa launched Lufthansa Express, an umbrella for onward travel from the airline’s hubs at Frankfurt and Munich which included high-speed ICE trains, long-distance buses, limousines and helicopter services.

The following year the airline added car2Go, a car-sharing platform – that is itself a collaboration between erstwhile rivals BMW and Daimler – to the Lufthansa Express offering. This gives airline passengers the ability to use shared Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars and avoid parking, airport and standard car2Go registration fees.

In 2017, car rental company Enterprise announced a partnership in the UK with Virgin Trains East Coast to offer car club vehicles at stations along the east coast mainline. Dan Gursel, Enterprise Car Club managing director, said at the time: “Integrating with key transport hubs is the next evolution of car clubs. They are quickly becoming the go-to option for people who want fast, easy access to a vehicle, wherever they are and at any time.”

Two years on, the company says it has car club vehicles within 500 metres of some 180 mainline and regional rail stations across the UK, covering around a third of all UK rail journeys.

Last summer, French rail company SNCF launched a new app called Assistant to replace its popular existing app. One of the biggest changes was the integration of transportation partners.

Karhoo added its 150 independent transport providers, including chauffeur companies such as Snapcar in Paris and Lyon, the Félix electric scooter network and local private hire companies. The other new partners were Le Bus Direct airport shuttles in Paris and Strasbourg’s bus and tram network.

At the time, Alexandre Vos, SNCF’s general manager of e-travellers, said, “Today, apps exist for every mode of transport, but none offers a single access point for looking and booking for different mobility offerings.”

In November, SNCF added the car-sharing platforms BlaBlaLines and Karos to the SNCF assistant. Between them, the two companies have more than a million users. The integration with Karhoo was also expanded to cover 43 towns and cities. Since launch, the Assistant app has been downloaded more than 13.6 million times.

Challenges and opportunities
The benefits of rail companies working more closely with other suppliers are clear but perhaps the biggest challenge in this happening more frequently is related to technology – rail content is not well established in the distribution systems that underpin corporate travel.

Rail companies in different countries typically use their own distribution systems. In some countries, where rail services have been liberalised – such as the UK – this even extends to different providers within the same country. The same is true in Japan, another country where rail is widely used for domestic business travel.

This fragmentation has led to the appearance of aggregators such as Trainline and Silverrail which can offer rail content from a range of rail companies through a single pipe.

While these aggregators simplify access geographically they are not good at giving access to negotiated corporate fares, says Bertrand Blais of KDS.

Amadeus has been at the forefront of trying to bring rail content to the GDS. It partners with Thalys to integrate its content into the Amadeus Selling Platform used by travel consultants. This means that consultants can compare rail and air or combine train travel with a flight or hotel as part of a multimodal journey.

Even here the offer is limited. “They can provide schedule and price,” says Blais, “but more than this is very limited.”

What the rail sector may need is something like NDC which promises to standardise access to add-on services in the air sector – but we could be in for a long wait.

“There is no IATA for rail,” says Blais. “The European Commission is looking at rail standardisation but it is managed nationally.”

While the landscape is fragmented, tech providers are stepping up to the challenge. KDS launched its Neo online booking tool in 2013 and made waves by offering the option of booking end-to-end travel. This was partly driven by KDS being founded in France where rail is highly competitive with air on domestic routes; rail and air content have been displayed in the same search window from the start.

Business travellers do not want this door-to-door service every time when using rail though, says Blais. “The majority of business travellers are doing regular trips, often in the same region and they know what they want – a specific train at a specific time and sometimes the carriage they want. What we notice is that if they travel long-haul, this is where they want to be assisted, where they are keen on recommendations,” says Blais.

“In Sweden, most travellers are passing through Stockholm Central to Arlanda airport and what the traveller wants is to book the Arlanda Express through the online platform. It is similar with Heathrow Express.” Access to rail content is important for KDS and it is currently finalising the integration of Finnish rail into the Neo tool and is also working with Trenitalia.

Richard Young at Heathrow Express says the company is working to push its API to tech partners. Online booking tool Atriis, used as a white label product by many of the mid-size TMCs, already grabs content from the API as does Travelport’s Smartpoint app. Young says: “Heathrow Express is working closely with other GDSs and we are certainly very interested in working with the managed travel industry.” 

Consumer experience
Yorkshire-based Fleetondemand, which has its roots in the car sector, is pioneering what is known as mobility as a service, or MaaS, through its Mobilleo app which integrates urban mobility, domestic city to city travel and onward travel around the globe.

Justin Whitston, the company’s CEO, says Mobilleo allows users to “find travel, book it and pay for it in the way the consumer wants to pay for it”.

The company’s technology powers a platform launched recently by Transport for Greater Manchester which brings together car hire, car clubs, trains, buses and Metrolink trams in the city as part of an EU-funded project called IMOVE which also piloted projects in Berlin, Gothenburg, Madrid and Turin.

“Two of the biggest users of that were Manchester Airport Group and the NHS,” says Whitston. The company is also working with local authorities around the country, such as the West Midlands, Derby, Nottingham and Southampton, as they implement ultra low emission zones in the way London has done.

Whitston sees its company’s direct-to-consumer proposition as akin to what TripActions and TravelPerk are offering but being able to drive different objectives. “Say, for example, a business has pool cars sitting around, we can skin our tech to brand those as car club vehicles and bring them into use.

“If you think about the typical TMC, they are focused around the flight, the hotel and, to a lesser extent, the car. The car experience is the poor relation in that market,” he says.

The company is looking at SMEs with up to £1million spend and uses the consumer-grade technology that travellers in these companies are likely to expect.

He says, “In the next three to five years, MaaS and the integration of micromobility and public transport content into the TMC model is going to go mainstream.”

Just like in the railroad wars, those taking part in moving people from A to B will realise that working together is best for everyone.