Can new EU Rail rules help people take the train with confidence?

New rules for rail passengers in the EU have been put on the table by the European Commission. They should finally allow passengers to travel with full rights and protections on long-distance or cross-border routes on a single ticket. 

Giving full rights to assistance, rerouting, reimbursement and compensation to passengers traveling on one ticket will fix the current situation where a passenger loses protections as soon as a delayed train causes a missed connection between different railways. 

Passengers will also be able to compare and buy from a range of combined, single tickets from different rail operators on ticketing platforms. Larger ticketing platforms must display all the available options, including those of their competitors, and, behind the scenes, share the data needed to sell through-tickets for routes across different countries.

The Rail travel proposals address a long-standing missing link in the European project: a rail network that works across borders as seamlessly as the European Union itself.

Building a stronger, more unified Europe starts with connecting people across it, and with ensuring that the protection and rights passengers enjoy do not stop at national borders.

Europeans should be able to travel beyond their national borders with the same confidence, choice and protection they have at home.

The proposals therefore aim to create a European rail network that people can rely on and trust enough to choose for long-distance travel over flying or driving — while making it easier for consumers to look beyond their national borders and experience Europe as one connected space.

Recommendations rooted in passengers’ real experiences

Euroconsumers has just shared its views and recommendations on two proposals that are part of the EU’s passengers package:

1. The targeted revision of the Rail Passenger Rights Regulation. It deals with passengers’ right when something goes wrong during a long journey booked with one single ticket that involves different railways operators. 
2. The proposed Rail Ticketing Regulation which sets out how and when a passenger can buy that single, multi-operator ticket.

Our recommendations are rooted in what consumers actually experience when they try to travel across borders by rail. Drawing on practical ticket-buying tests and consumer journey data from our five members in Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Poland, we have identified where the proposed rules could fall short in practice – and how to fix them. 

This real-world evidence puts the passenger journey at the heart of our recommendations, helping strengthen consumer rights and make cross-border rail a more reliable and attractive choice. Here’s our analysis and recommendations: 

1. Get compensation right

Threshold levels should reflect the full impact of late arrivals on people.

The new compensation rights for multi-operator journeys proposed in the revision of the Rail Passenger Rights Regulation are welcome but don’t reflect the reality of passenger delays. As written, the regulation only requires compensation of 25% of the ticket price to be paid when a service is over an hour late. It makes any delay under an hour invisible to the current compensation regime. 

Threshold levels should reflect the full impact of late arrivals on people trying to get to work, linking up with onward travel or meeting friends..

Altroconsumo’s data shows that more than half of the high-speed services delayed by 15 minutes or more never reach even the 30-minute mark, let alone the one-hour floor at which EU compensation begins.  Yet delays under 30 minutes means thousands of people facing frustration and disruption.

Altroconsumo monitored 54 Italian routes using live arrival data from Rete Ferroviaria, the national rail infrastructure body. They took 28,000 data points over 43 consecutive days and found only 5.7% of Frecciarossa services and 3.6% of Italo services were delayed by 30 minutes or more. However, 13% and 7.8% respectively were delayed by 15 minutes or more. 

Compensation thresholds are also a performance signal to operators, an incentive to improve and compete as the best way to travel. We recommend: 

• Lowering the compensation thresholds to 30% of the ticket price from 30 minutes, 50% from 60 minutes and 100% from 120 minutes, and have a dedicated trigger at 15 minutes for high-speed services. 
• Making compensation automatic so passengers don’t need to submit a lengthy claim.  
• Having uniform thresholds across all operators and service types, so that protection does not depend on which company a passenger travels with. 

2. Close gaps in single ticketing requirements 

Cross-border rail only works if passengers are protected throughout their entire journey.

If the EU wants people to choose trains over cars and planes for longer trips, they need to be able to book with confidence and know that their rights travel with them.

The problem is that the proposed rules tie these rights to how a journey is booked. Passengers are protected if they buy a single ticket, or several tickets in the same transaction. But what happens when a passenger cannot book the whole journey on one platform? That is where the gaps start to appear:

On one site, we found that it if you want to travel from Milan to Brussels, you can only  buy a ticket from Milan–Paris with no option to buy the Paris–Brussels Eurostar leg. It was therefore not possible to buy a through journey from Milan to Brussels in the same transaction, which would leave a passenger unable to claim compensation for knock-on delays and problems across their entire journey.  

Consumers who want to shop around are hit by this gap – passengers who want to take the best price on each leg of a two part journey will often have to buy from two different sellers. Under the proposal as drafted, saving money means less rights.  

The scope is also limited by a provision (Article 2) that allows Member States to exempt urban, suburban and regional services from rail passenger rights. Plenty of countries use these exemptions, meaning that a passenger who takes a local train to link up with longer distance or international services has less protection over the entire journey as that leg of the journey is classed as separate.  We recommend:

• Extending the rights in Article 12 to any journey whose connections respect the applicable minimum connection times, regardless of the number of commercial transactions in which it was purchased. 
• Ensuring that national exemptions under Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2021/782 cannot apply to a service that forms part of a journey connecting to a long distance or cross-border service, so that protection covers the first and last legs of the journey. 

3. Clarify responsibility when a journey goes wrong 

Certainty and consistency builds protection and trust, but the proposals could leave passengers unsure about how much is owed to them, and who it is that owes them.  

If a passenger’s journey involves several trains and operators, a delay on one part of the journey can affect the whole trip. But for journeys lasting more than 12 hours, the proposed rules would only compensate the passenger for the delayed part of the journey, rather than taking into account the delay to the journey as a whole.  

But there is also a problem with compensation claims. Operators would have to tell passengers if third parties are handling claims, but the rules do not ensure that the claim will be processed quickly or without unnecessary hassle.   

Passengers also need to have better information about delays with real-time updates, and their rights to compensation and support when this happens. Our Spanish member OCU has called for obligations on operators to tell people clearly what’s happening and remind them of their rights as delays go on. They should also be clear about which operator is responsible for reaching passengers stranded in remote areas.  We recommend:

• Calculating compensation for single-ticket multi-operator journeys on total journey delay, regardless of journey length, removing the 12-hour limitation. 
• Building on the proposal’s transfer-of-liability provisions by guaranteeing that entrusting a third party with a claim never reduces the speed or quality of resolution, not merely that the passenger is informed of the transfer. 
• Requiring prompt, proactive information to affected passengers when an incident occurs, including a reminder of the rights that accrue as the delay lengthens. 
• Naming the responsible operator explicitly and set quantified minimum standards for assistance and binding timeframes for rerouting, meal assistance and overnight accommodation, require operators to hold contingency plans for passengers stranded away from major stations. 
• Requiring operators and ticket vendors to give consumers access to a certified alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanism that works across borders, covering not only automatic delay compensation but also proven consequential losses. 
• Requiring Member States to sanction railway undertakings promptly where delay-related non-compliance is repeated, and to report publicly on the enforcement action they take 

4. Make cross-border ticketing work in practice 

Under the proposed Rail Ticketing Regulation, passengers would be able to browse, compare and book services from multiple rail operators in one go, on their preferred booking platform they choose.

Currently, travelers are unable to see, compare or buy the journeys available to them. Our team at Euroconsumers tried to buy cross-border tickets to better understand passengers’ actual experience, they found: 

• Some major rail operators did not show competing services on routes where they operated themselves. This is a commercial choice rather than a technical limitation. 
• Identical products sold at wildly different prices, for example, the same journey with the exact same conditions  from Vienna–Munich EuroCity was sold at four different prices on four different sites, ranging from €19.99 to  €99.70. 
• Fare conditions themselves were often unclear or incompletely disclosed, with penalty conditions missing from the sales channel, and key fare rules buried on separate pages instead of shown at purchase. 

The core features of the Regulation which are designed to put this right include: obliging operators to share their rail products with online ticketing services, requiring operators above 50% market share to display and sell competitors’ services, and framing the resulting commercial agreements on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. 

These are the right instruments for the problem, but need to be scoped around the passenger’s journey rather than around individual services, to cover fare conditions not just price and to be enforceable without waiting on national measures.  We recommend:  

• Scope the display-and-sell obligation to the passenger’s whole journey rather than to individual services and a market-share threshold, so that the cross-border and connecting journeys where distribution gaps actually occur are covered rather than falling outside the rule by design.
• Requiring the mandatory shared dataset to include complete, standardised fare condition information including exchange, refund and cancellation terms, so that offers presented side by side are genuinely comparable.
• Classifying the sale of a rail ticket without easy access to complete information on its exchange, refund and cancellation conditions as a misleading omission within the meaning of Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices.
• Requiring that any adjustment a retailer makes to the price it received for a ticket, whether a service fee, mark-up or reduction, be shown to the consumer as a separate, itemised amount at the point of sale rather than folded into a single headline price.
• Confirming that national enforcement bodies may examine consumer-facing price divergence for an identical service under identical conditions when assessing whether distribution terms are fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory.

Europe is on the move: give passengers the cross-border tickets and protections they need 

Simplifying the process of planning and booking regional, long-distance and cross-border travel in a fragmented railway system is a bold idea that must succeed if the EU is to shift more passengers from short-haul flights to rail.   

Consumers need confidence that their rights will work in practice and that operators have a real incentive to provide better services. Stronger consumer protection can help make rail a more attractive choice, encourage people to spend more of their travel budget on trains, and support the shift towards more sustainable transport.

Ultimately, the goal should be to make train travel the easy, trusted choice for long-distance journeys.