SNCF
rebrands high-speed
“The key thing is product differentiation
– you have to start small and offer some- thing that they do not already offer,” he explains. “You have to look at city pairs and how you are treating your customers. “You have to make sure your customer experience exceeds the competitors’. The big guys are super-tankers and we are designing a speedboat.” It may be that small “niche” players will be the first to dip a toe in the water of the new competitive rail landscape when it comes to offering new services. But what will be the potential impact for passengers? One of the few countries to have competing rail operators on the same track is the Czech Republic and that is not without its drawbacks.
Zuzana Cechova, director of pricing and marketing at Czech Railways, says: “When it comes to the competitive environment, Prague to Ostrava has three competitors on the line, and competition has also started on Prague-Brno.
“This situation has created a new volume of transportation and more passengers are travelling on the line to Ostrava. But there
is also a negative side to having compe- tition on the track because there is not enough capacity for freight and regional transport systems.” Perhaps it would be too optimistic to think that a more competitive rail market in the EU could be created quickly – after all, there is still not much competition within the UK despite the franchise system having been in place for 20+ years. Protectionism by some EU states could also rear its head – it’s worth noting that the EU originally wanted to make competitive tendering mandatory for all public service contracts. But this has now been watered down to include some exceptions under which a government can still award a rail contract directly to a company if doing so leads to a “better quality of service or cost efficiency”.
There are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the European rail industry over the next few years – and not just to see whether the UK decouples completely from the EU’s planned single rail market and goes down its own solitary track.
of rebranding its TGV high-speed services as In Oui. The new In Oui branding was first launched on SNCF’s Paris-Bordeaux TGV route in July when the Sud Europe Atlantique high-speed line between Tours and Bordeaux opened. The new brand will be gradually rolled out across the existing TGV network as new and revamped carriages are introduced on to other lines. This process is expected to be completed by 2020. SNCF previously launched a low-cost rail brand, called Oui Go, in 2013.
Fabien Soulet, SNCF’s director of business travel, B2B and travel agency sales, told BBT: “TGV is a generic term that anybody can use, so we needed a new name that could be associated with SNCF and the services that we provide. “We will be using the In Oui name on all the TGVs as we upgrade them. In Oui trains will have free wifi, even at high speed, and the coach will be either new or renovated. “All the new trains from Paris to
Bordeaux will have the new label and then it will be extended over the next couple of years.” Soulet added that business travellers currently accounted for about 30 per cent of all SNCF passengers and around 40 per cent of sales revenue. “UK business passengers mostly use our services when they are travelling between two locations in France,” he said.
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