Consumer Experience

Volcanic disruption, an opportunity missed?

When over a 1000 flights were cancelled during the volcanic cloud disruption, many travellers looked for alternative ways to get home. Stranded after a few days business or holidays and desperate to get back home, what was the alternative. Some travellers would have called their travel consultant, their assistant or their travel agency, the people that help them book their travel, and who book their travel on a regular basis.

This was a wonderful opportunity for the rail industry to open up its services and join together to get people back home. Whereas some services were enjoying vastly increased number of bookings others were not, quite simply because travellers and consultants/agents were unable to book onward journey or piece together their full itinerary. Gone was an easy way of showing what was available from a to b as you would expect from any airline schedules and availability computer display.

There are some excellent examples of trials and tribulations of travellers trying to get home or trying to get to an important meeting or family event, here was an excellent opportunity for railways to take new market share. However, what became apparent is that it is still difficult or impossible to book rail tickets abroad and that domestic train stations only list domestic destinations, or very rarely international destinations. Trying to get customers back from south Europe to north Europe became a headache and a great challenge.

An international e-ticket or even a pan-european journey planner would have been a great help to these passengers, the technlogy is available, the agreement of a standard is still being discussed. The "digital" journey planner database exists, but not readily available to third parties such as online, travel agencies etc.

This could have been the ideal opportunity to accelerate the modal shift from air to rail, do we have to wait for another eruption?

26 May 2010

Posted by: Philip Martin

Comments

I would be interested in knowing how many additional services railways were able to put on to cater for the spike in demand caused by the volcanic disruptions?

There was not a great deal of publicity about the railways assisting in getting stranded people home, and as a result benefitting from the closure of airspace by increased revenue. Trains were full - sure - but were there many additional trains operating to and from key affected locations? Are railways generally operating their rolling stock at full capacity, or is it that they not have the systems in place to handle last minute additions to their planned schedules?

By Anthony Cozens on 28 May 2010

Taking advantage of the global travel impact of the volcanic cloud, an mobility analysis performed by Northwestern University in the US showed that at the height of the disruption, with the 27 major European airports shut down, 10 percent of the entire global air traffic system was removed. The results affected not only mobility of people, but that of fresh vegetables and fruit, grains and other food, medicine, machinery parts and more. At the very least, over shorter distances, we should have alternate (non-airline) means for moving the masses and goods in and out of population hubs.

Publicity covered how celebrities took to the ferries and cruise ships to bridge the gap to their destinations, however the press has made assumptions about the trains highly supporting travellers' misfortunes. Natural disasters happen. One must ask how would we hold up under similar circumstances? How does the disaster compare to 9/11 on mobility?

By Tonja Hughes on 1 Jun 2010

Undoubtedly an opportunity missed on so many fronts. In terms of politics momentum should have been gained in order to restart the pursuit of a pan-European ticketing system as thousands would have experienced the difficulty of accessing cross border times, tickets and prices.

To my mind however the press failed to advertise and highlight the far reaching nature of the problem. Air industry professionals must regard the problem with incredulity. It certainly seems a very strange problem for an EU market to have.

The solution will have 3 phases.

1 - Attention - Industry bodies need to pressure government and organisations highlighting the problem (Try searching for a competitive fare Amsterdam to Geneva)

2 - Standards. Information and technical standards need to be set and adhered to. Contributors need to be incentivised to become early adopters. A Railway Clearing House needs to be set up to aportion revenue.

3 - Improvements of Accessibility. Organisations (e.g RailTeam) need to promote the services but also market them in a way that they become accessible. It should be as easy to book a ticket from a-to-b as it is a flight. It should be possible even to present the user with an aggregated fare (made up of the trip elements) reasonably easily. At the moment it's impossible.

By Richard Lenthall on 11 Jun 2010

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