Page 437 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Low cost in high-speed train in France. Customer-king and the public service guillotine

Eurostar Snap

Launched Displayed objective

2016 Idem for Eurostar

Commercial modalities

Standard class exclusively. Reservations through Facebook only 7 days before
departure, indicating whether morning or afternoon is preferred. The traveler receives
confirmation and identification of the timeslot decided by Snap 48h before departure at
the latest. Subject to availabilities of dates and trains. Return the same day sometimes
is impossible.

We could point out that the creation rhythm of those subsidiaries or new commercial modalities
is increasing. Nine years separate OUIGO from iDTGV but IZY, TGVpop and « Eurostar Snap »
have followed OUIGO in three years only, and those three last initiatives were born on the same
year. We could also point out that over the years, commercial products are more and more
“entry range”.
Those formulas impose the dematerialization of sales (suppression of counters which implies
that the client works, and spends time and money) and use yield management (price modulation
combining the rate of reservation and the departure date, a logic that many of our European
neighbors, even great rail nations such as Germany, Belgium or Switzerland, ignore). More and
more often, the price of cancelled tickets is lost or a change of trains is subject to prohibitive
prices. Optionalization (billing of any additional delivery, in Izy the second luggage can cost
more than the ticket price) is now the rule. In some cases, train occupancy is over-dense (by
suppression of bar wagon). Finally, in all the last formulas, the traveler is attracted by low fares
but is not certain to be able to travel at this price, and if he still wishes to take the train, he
might have to pay a very high price. According to Cyrine Gardes : “client is king, but you’re not
his queen”.

2. The heart of resistance is attacked through its periphery

In 2004, with iDTGV, the introduction of low cost in SNCF materialized an important restructu-
ration for public service on French railways, accompanied some years later by the apparition of
long-distance bus travels. This important management decision was not a provisory measure, in
order to straighten budgets, but a durable orientation which, along with the breakup of SNCF in
2 EPIC (in 1997) then 3 (in 2015), aimed at the bypassing of resistances coming from workers to
adaptations deemed necessary by the opening of the market. And, as could be expected, sooner
or later the experimentations of production re-organization would touch all activity, coming
back to the parent company SNCF. In the same way that “helped jobs” have degraded the norm
for ordinary jobs, the introduction of low cost has helped sooner or later to undermine public
service and the working, living and job conditions of its personnel. The heart of resistance is
attacked through its periphery.

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 435