Is rail ticketing in Europe about to change?
That is the question on many people's lips after this week's announcement by UK rail booking site Trainline of its acquisition of Captain Train, in a deal which TechCrunch says could be worth between €160 and €170 million.
The deal will see the creation of a "one-stop shop" for rail travel covering 36 operators in 22 countries. Trainline handles 28.8 million visitors to its website and app each month. Captain Train has more than 1.6 million registered users and currently sells more than 5,000 tickets daily.
Trainline says that business customers, including corporations, online booking tools and travel management companies, "will benefit from a consolidated source for European rail information".
Clare Gilmartin, CEO of Trainline, said: "For too long, booking rail tickets in Europe has been an overwhelming and complicated process for customers. We're hugely excited that, with this acquisition, Trainline is making European rail travel easier and more accessible than ever before. Joining forces with Captain Train means that within a couple of clicks, any customer will be able to travel in Europe by train, something that today is really difficult to do. It should be easy to buy a rail ticket — simple to book, transparency on the best fares, no queuing in stations and a great customer service experience overall."
Jean-Daniel Guyot, CEO of Captain Train said: "We share the same ambition, and it was a natural step for us to decide to work with Trainline. The complementary nature of our offerings and the scope of the markets that we will cover will enable us to reach our shared objective of making rail travel in Europe easier."
Trainline is owned by venture capitalists KKR, who bought it in January 2015, derailing a planned initial public offering.
Philipp Freise, head of technology, media and telecoms in Europe at KKR, said: "One year ago when KKR first invested in Trainline we had the vision of creating the clear global leader in digital rail mobility. The combination of Trainline and Captain Train is an important step on this journey, and will bring together a management team of world class talent in rail, tech, product and marketing."
The European rail booking environment is made-up of a patchwork of different back-end systems built by companies such as Capgemini, Sabre, IBM and others.
Back in 2009, the Railteam alliance shelved a plan to implement a common booking system among its member rail companies. However, in 2013, CER (representing rail companies) and ECTAA and ETTSA (representing vendors) announced a joint initiative called Full Service Model which was planned to "strengthen business partnerships by making it easier and cheaper for both railways and ticket vendors to provide accurate and transparent information about available rail products, for the benefit of their customers."
That same year saw the launch of SilverRail which has done much to get these disparate systems to talk to each other. It is widely used by retailers as well as rail operators themselves.
In October 2015, ETTSA established a strategic partnership with Hit Rail to leverage its HEROS message inter-operability service, which allows rail reservations systems to interconnect and inter-operate even if they are using different standards.
This latest deal should mean that it finally gets easier to book rail across Europe rather than just in one country. That said, there is still a long way to go to get all these systems working together in the way that travel buyers would really like.