and also aids productivity; after all, you can work on a train journey in a way you can’t while transiting through an airport. And it usually complies with corporate governance in contributing the least emissions per passenger kilometre. But rail can make travel bookers pull out their hair. As if many different companies in different countries, plus different content between what’s released in home countries and what’s released in non-home markets, wasn’t enough, the offers themselves vary. The fragmented nature of ownership isn’t the real problem according to Raj Sachdave, managing partner of Black Box Partnerships. Instead, he says, the lack of what he describes as ‘data normalisation’ is the root of the distribution challenge. Sachdave explains: “The way hotels distribute inventory across borders is the same. Rail doesn’t have that luxury. If you can normalise data, like they do with air and hotels, you can distribute with ease.” There are multiple reasons. There are many government-owned rail operating companies in Europe – France, Germany Spain and Italy, to name a few – and some impose traditional distribution constraints in the belief that this will protect the home nation. For example, SNCF has a low-cost product called SNCF Connect but it believes that it is a consumer product and so it is not made available to TMCs or the B2B market . Compare that to air, where low-cost carriers are happy to make pipes of content available for TMCs. The result is frustrated travel managers. A recent survey of more than 60 buyers by the UK and Ireland’s Institute of Travel Management found
The way hotels distribute their inventory across borders is the same, but rail travel doesn’t have that luxury
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SPRING 2023 | businesstravelnewseurope.com
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