Digital Observatory and New Projects Platform

Project description

The international activity of European Railways concerning Commercial, Marketing and Distribution issues for Passengers transport has been traditionally very clear defined and very active. For both, commercialisation of international rail services or cross commercialisation of train services provided by the other operators, the UIC Commission, Platform and Forum (successive names for a same activity) has defined the main principles, the procedures, control, formats, etc.

But since a certain time, the commercial approach for Passengers rail services has dramatically changed, due to several reasons: the change in the commercial cultures, the competition with alternative transport modes, aviation, private cars and buses, the big reduction of night trains and consequently reduction of commercial competitive distances (i.e. it’s no longer logic the emission of a rail ticket to travel form Lisbon to Warsaw), etc. And this change has specially affected to operators due to the incorporation of the new technologies, giving the possibility of dematerialisation of the concept of “ticket”, the incorporation of flexible fares, the establishment of different modes of payment, the competition in the information ad purchase functions, etc.

All these elements make the role of the UIC Passengers activity quite different from the precedent years. And this fact should continue to become a greater problem as soon as new problems and challenges will appear. So far, when a new initiative was raised up, it could be send to several specific working groups (IRT, NRT, EWT) to be developed. From now, it is possible that no one of these working groups should be adapted to make face to a new challenge or to solve certain new type of problems.
Consequently, a new flexible platform should be implemented in order to, at least, be able to commercially analyse new ideas or problems raised by members, without worrying about if it matches or not with the existing workgroups.