Page 459 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Customer personalisation and service efficiency: the pillars of the new Renfe business policy

Thus, with these findings in mind, from the 8th of February 2013, Renfe started to implement
a new strategy based on actions aimed at increasing the flexibility of the offer by introducing
a dynamic price system, so that the nature of the ticket price would become mobile. This, by
the way, was a widespread form of work in other modes, but it had never been implemented
in Spanish railway.

The most relevant measures regarding prices adopted at that time were:

Û AVE General Rate -11%

Û AVE/LD Return Ticket -20%

Û AVE AVE Pass -35%

Û AVE/LD Promo Rate up to -70%

Û AVE/LD Youth Card -30%

Û AVE/LD More frequency and new routes

And from the date of implementation of this new business policy including, as it can be seen,
great discounts on the most common rates, the railway use started to increase. This increase led
rail transport to outperform air transport in 2014 for the first time ever, becoming, according
to INE (Spanish National Institute of Statistics), Spaniards favourite means of transport and
reaching 50,000 more passengers than airplane for trips within Spain.

Beyond this, today, 4 years after the beginning of this groundbreaking business policy, Renfe
can boast it has attracted 9 million new customers, which means a 40% boost in the number of
passengers and a 10% occupation increase.
A significant detail is the fact that the occupation increases achieved over these years have
taken place in every AVE corridor. This means that the beneficial effects of this new business
policy have reached all the lines and not only the most used ones (such as Madrid - Barcelona
or Madrid - Seville), as it might have been expected.
These excellent results have taken Renfe to deepen into this line of work and extend and
expand this business strategy, delving deeper into the customer loyalty concept too.
Major business milestones:

▪ 1993.- Quality commitments with the Customer

▪ 1994.- Punctuality commitment: “5 minutes late”

▪ 1999.- Outsourcing to the private sector of a 50% of train maintenance

▪ 2005.- Complete independence of Railway Infrastructure Administration (“Adif”)

▪ 2006.- Prices with less and less intervention

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 457