For years, budget airlines like Ryanair have reshaped European mobility, making weekend trips to Lisbon or study semesters abroad a routine part of life. Now, the European Commission wants rail to trigger a similar transformation—not through rock-bottom prices, but by offering seamless booking and comfort.
Brussels has unveiled its "one journey, one ticket" proposal, designed to let passengers search, book, and pay for multi-operator cross-border rail journeys in a single transaction. The plan also guarantees passenger rights across the entire trip if disruptions occur. This initiative comes as transport remains the EU's only sector where emissions continue to climb, and as a Transport & Environment study finds that 60% of Europeans abandon train bookings due to complexity.
The Gap Between Ambition and Reality
Despite the vision, basic failures persist. Spanish passengers cannot book the direct Paris–Barcelona train on their own national app, while travellers from Vienna to Paris are forced to route bookings through Germany. These are not infrastructure problems but ticketing and coordination failures.
"We have half the routes you can fly with no train connection at all," says Lena Schilling, a Green MEP involved in parliamentary discussions. "And then we tell people, you can always choose. But the truth is, we are not there yet."
The comparison to low-cost airlines is deliberate. Carriers like Ryanair and Wizz Air rewired European mobility, making cross-border commutes and Erasmus exchanges routine. The Commission bets that trains can spark a similar psychological shift—changing not just how people travel, but what they believe is possible.
Operators Push Back on Data Sharing
Alberto Mazzola, director general of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER), warns against moving too aggressively. He points to progress: "In Germany, Deutsche Bahn sold 75% more cross-border tickets in the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year." He notes that a standard for exchanging ticketing data was approved at the end of last year after four years of work and nearly €1 billion invested across the European market.
Mazzola's main concern is the proposal's requirement that operators open ticketing data to third-party platforms. "Would you oblige every hotel to provide its offers to Google?" he asks. "As soon as a platform becomes dominant, it will set the conditions. That's what happened with Booking.com. It will ask for higher margins, and that means higher ticket prices."
Schilling dismisses these objections. "Most train operators receive public money," she counters. "So the market freedom argument is misguided when your product is already funded by taxpayers. Trains are a common good, like roads."
Infrastructure and Price Remain Stubborn Hurdles
Ticketing reform alone cannot transform European rail. Since 1995, the continent has lost roughly 12,000 kilometres of railway lines while motorway networks expanded. Europe still operates with about 30 national signalling systems, different energy networks, and technical standards that complicate cross-border services. Getting a new train authorised for international routes can take years.
"You have the infrastructure, then the trains, then the tickets. You don't start with the tickets," says Mazzola. Schilling agrees that infrastructure investment must follow, but argues that easier ticketing is an essential first step. "If train prices get cheaper and things are easier to access, more people will use it. That is the idea. It is not just an elitist thing."
The hardest challenge remains price. On many routes, flights are still much cheaper than trains, especially for younger travellers. Closing that gap requires broader political decisions—taxes on aviation fuel, VAT reform on rail tickets, and greater support for night trains—none of which are in the current proposal.
Schilling paints a hopeful picture: "In the future, you open one app, search for the connection, buy it with one click, and have full passenger rights for the whole journey. Then, finally, in the best case, you arrive. And if you are not travelling through Germany, maybe even on time."
The joke lands because the underlying issue is trust. Cheap airlines changed Europe not only by lowering fares, but by making mobility feel easy and reliable enough for people to reorganise their lives around it. The "one journey, one ticket" proposal now moves through the European Parliament and Council, where battles over data-sharing and liability rules are expected to intensify. But demand for rail is already there—trains across Europe are frequently fully booked, the Interrail generation is growing, and remote workers increasingly want to live in one country and work in another. Climate-conscious travellers want alternatives to flying but often encounter booking systems that make international rail feel unnecessarily difficult.
