Page 438 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Dressen, Marnix

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”.

3. The heart of resistance is attacked through its periphery

In 2004, with iDTGV, the introduction of low cost in SNCF materialized an important
restructuration 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

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