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New pan-European rail booking service launched

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Train travellers can now book tickets from the UK to European destinations in a single transaction

Train travellers can for the first time book tickets from Britain to France, Germany and other European destinations in a single transaction.

Start-up firm Loco2.com is offering the service in an attempt to make cross-border European rail trips cheaper and easier to organise.

Loco2 said it wanted to provide a service for trains that was as simple as flights on budget airlines. It also wants to promote rail travel as a green alternative to flying.

"Until now, rail users have had to go to different websites to book different parts of their journey," says Jamie Andrews, co-founder and managing director of Loco2. "What we've done is make it possible to book the whole journey in one go on one website in one transaction."

It has taken several steps to get to this point.

The first was gaining access to the booking and timetabling systems of the French national rail operator, SNCF, followed by those of the German network, Deutsche Bahn.

The latest development has involved integrating data from these systems with information from the Association of Train Operating Companies in Britain, which means it can offer seamless ticketing on continental journeys that start or end at any station in the UK, starting from 12 November.

It claims to be the only booking service with this UK dimension in place. At least one competitor, French company Capitaine Train, offers one-stop bookings across the French and German networks.

Loco2 provides a less complete ticketing service for destinations in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and a number of other countries. By reducing the complexity and hassle of international train bookings, the idea is to encourage people to take the train, not the plane.

It is not simply about making money from ticket sales. The name Loco2 stands for low CO2, and it wants to promote rail travel as a green alternative. Trains generate fewer carbon emissions than aircraft.

But the path to simple cross-border ticketing has been strewn with bureaucratic and technical obstacles. Each European country has its own rail system, with jealously guarded arrangements for timetabling and booking trains. The biggest problem Loco2 has faced is persuading the national rail networks to open up their systems to outsiders.

"Largely speaking, European rail operators have been reluctant to see change in the market and they were fairly happy with the status quo, even though customers were incredibly frustrated," says Mr Andrews. "It has taken efforts by the European Commission to begin regulating to open up the market to give companies like us the opportunity to push things forward."

There have also been technical difficulties to overcome in hooking up the computer systems of the different national networks.

"We employ two sorts of geek: trainspotters and software nerds," explains Mr Andrews, "Combined, we like to think they form a formidable force."

Train travellers can now book tickets from the UK to European destinations in a single transaction

...

It claims to be the only booking service with this UK dimension in place. At least one competitor, French company Capitaine Train, offers one-stop bookings across the French and German networks.

Loco2 provides a less complete ticketing service for destinations in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and a number of other countries.

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What am I doing wrong, or did the article's author not actually check it out?

What?  You mean newspaper headline writers just make things up??  :o ::) ;D

Graham i wonder if it's still possible to go from Aberdeen to Athens all the way by train. I don't think you can go via Kosovo and Montenegro which was the old route via the former  Yugoslavia, and I'm not sure with the Greek Railways' cutbacks you can still get from Sophia  to Thesseloniki and from there onwards to Athens.

shouldn't I expect the journalist who wrote the article  body to have checked his story?

Hello all,

The journalist who wrote the article in the Independent this week got rather over excited about the potential of Loco2.com (http://"https://loco2.com"). Though you can't fault him for his enthusiasm, what a journey Aberdeen to Athens would be were it possible! :)

When we launched UK rail on our site last week we used more modest examples, e.g. Manchester to Milan and Bath to Berlin, which will deliver results from the integrations we have for UK, French and German rail, combined with other international trains CNL, Thello, TGV Lyria etc. Unfortunately we aren't able, and don't claim, to offer trains from Aberdeen to Athens or Swansea to Sarejevo (we can do Rhyl to Rome though!). But of course we aren't able to control the accuracy of articles written about us.

We've tried to be realistic about our strengths and weaknesses since, as @bignosemac has discovered, we aren't able to offer many trains and tickets into Eastern Europe. We have a map and explanation about the service we provide on the site https://loco2.com/about/train-ticket-coverage (https://loco2.com/about/train-ticket-coverage). 

Those of you familiar with rail in Greece will know that sadly there have been no international trains running in or out of Greece since 2011. You can read about that on Seat61's Greece pages (http://"http://www.seat61.com/Greece.htm#By train all the way").

And for trains to Sarajevo, Loco2 can book trains as far as Zagreb, but as far as we know the train from Zagreb to Sarajevo can't be booked online anywhere (happy to be corrected), and the new trains that we would have had in theory from the end of last year, was never launched. See below,   

"The Zagreb-Sarajevo train was due to become a modern air-conditioned Talgo train from December 2012, but this was delayed and now it seems the still-unused Talgo trains are to be leased to Turkish Railways so may never run to Sarajevo."

I hope no-one minds me coming into the conversation, but I wanted to take the opportunity to point out that the article mentioned isn't representative of our service. However, I'd love to hear other feedback from members of this forum since we rely on feedback (especially from train buffs) so that we can  continue to improve.

Kate
Co-founder | Loco2.com