Following the UIC High Level Passenger Meeting (HLPM) on 4 October 2019 in Barcelona, Passenger CEOs made a commitment to reinforce implementation and communication activities, to demonstrate tangible improvements for customers by establishing EU-wide through-ticketing systems that need to be completed by 2021.

To this end Passenger CEOs mandated UIC and RU representatives in FSM to provide a common roadmap for integration and development of the two complementary distribution solutions (new Tariff Model and Full Service Model), taking into account through-ticketing and multimodality.

nTM is a UIC project launched in April 2019 to answer to a specific request from UIC members to develop a new tool based on new UIC harmonised tariff terms & conditions, in order to offer customer-friendly and competitive prices for international travel, based on timetables.

FSM is a rail distribution sector industry initiative launched in 2013 aiming to develop an Open IT Specification between rail service providers and international distributors, including third party retailers in order to complement individual bilateral IT-solutions between distributors and rail service providers. FSM develops online interface specifications between rail distribution players (B2B) to improve travellers’ access to rail tickets.

A Technical Agreement was signed on 8 April 2020 by Marc Guigon UIC Passenger Department Director and Vittorio Carta, FSM Initiative Manager.

Based on the previous points, nTM and FSM actors agree to carry out technical work aiming to develop complementary functional parts developed in a Unique/Integrated specification.

This specification is already drafted in IRS 09918-10 and shall be managed in a new joint UIC nTM/FSM working group.

This is a strategic evolution for railways to closely collaborate with distributors with a unique interface between the different actors (Distributors, Allocators, Carriers) in order to minimise costs and complexity of the international rail distribution systems.