Page 440 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Dressen, Marnix

2011), in both senses of the word construction, as “putting the client at work” and his
“commercial education” (Tiffon 2013). It is again essentially those same working class
populations that are subject to additional costs. This clientele segment is what’s more
victim from monetary penalization if it changes its train schedules postpones or simply
cancels its journey.

3.2 Making not solvent clientele accept a downgrading

The trend is, in both train categories, that the traveler pays his ticket a higher price as
the day and hour of the departure approaches but in both segments, the yield management
cannot be reduced to this simple rule (Finez & Perennes, 2015). Tickets can be sold again
at lower fares than those that existed the day before. Some imagine that this deliberate
opacity policy allows commercials to blur lines and disarm the homo oeconomicus that
would be too virtuoso or would like to turn marketing algorithms to his advantage. In a
deliberate way, everything is made in order to blur lines, like consumer associations have
had the occasion to deplore. “Almost nobody pays his TGV ticket at full fare”, was happy
to note “SNCF mobilités” CEO, G. Pepy. It is because the swamp of fares gives the illusion
of low prices that blur lines and the perception of the consumer. Nobody could say anymore
what the “normal price” of a train ticket would be on a given destination. This is why at the
end of the 2000’s, a parliamentary report advised communication to the consumer buying a
train ticket of what was its median selling price.

Blurring lines, but to what avail? Even in the limits presupposed by the low cost offer, the aim
is to – what a paradox – sell at the highest possible price, even if that means reintroducing a
form of 3rd class, a category suppressed in 1956 and surreptitiously reintroduced under the
form of full trains that offer lesser facilities than the contemporary standard (Kestel and
Larue, 2016). In managerial medias, the general director of Voyage SNCF explained thus her
commercial strategy: “we prefer (…) putting a client that pays less in a seat that costs half
as much than in a TGV. We do not oppose the two offers but are constructing a global offer
with both, a low cost offer, that is an industrial model and a contract with a different and
constrained traveler, and a more qualitative TGV offer, with very high travel frequencies.”
We could not describe best the segmentation of clientele and the confinement of the poor
(to make it easier) in poorer trains. But of course things are not said this way. One of the
main difficulties in analyzing the public railway service resides in the “lack of coherence
between words and things” (Quessette 2016, p. 21).

3.3 Drain all the clientele that can be drained

For SNCF and “SNCF Mobilité”, on the commercial side, this clientele segmentation
fundamentally amounts to draining all the clientele that can be drained (even on the
intermodal way by launching an interurban coach company, car-renting between individuals
or a car-sharing company). It is probably the reason why all trains will not become low cost.
There would exist, what’s more, some sort of ceiling to the extension of low cost, just like
in air travel where it would represent, according to some, 50% of the market ; because of
social status, comfort or convenience of correspondence, some parts of the clientele do not
wish to use flights or train that are low cost. Coming out of the Board of directors’ meeting
of January 2016, SNCF Mobilité’s direction envisioned that classic TGV would tomorrow be
“a little smaller than today, and OUIGO bigger”. SNCF would try to have 25% of its trains
becoming low cost in 2020 (five times more than today).

Inversely, some parts of the low cost clientele that are not deprived from economic capital

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