On 11. April, EPF attended the Florence School of Regulation’s 15th Intermodal Forum, which explored key regulatory and industry challenges in achieving a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing system across Europe.

The European Commission (EC) committed to fostering multimodality in 2020 as part of its Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy (SSMS). President Ursula von der Leyen has highlighted in her Political Guidelines for the Next Commission and in her Mission Letter to the Commissioner-designate for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, the need for a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation to ensure that European citizens can buy one single ticket on one single platform and get passengers’ rights for their whole trip.

For EPF, the main outcome of any regulatory intervention should be to facilitate end-user access to comprehensive, unbiased and reliable information about available (multimodal, and multi-operator) journey options, and to make it easier for passengers to buy a ticket in a one-stop-shop. To achieve this, several ways forward are possible:

  • Push dominant vertically integrated platforms to sell competing services, against their own business interests;
  • Strengthen third party platforms that have no vested interest in any of the operators whose tickets they offer for sale;
  • Set up nation-wide multimodal information and ticketing platforms (as done in Norway or Finland, and planned in Austria, for example).

In EPF’s view, data sharing and readiness to conclude distribution agreements between operators and Multimodal Digital Mobility Services should be the default option, i.e. the norm, under FRAND – fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory – terms, in line with DG COMP and national competition authority rulings, which have imposed such obligations on e.g. RENFE and DB. In general, competition is good for passengers – both competition between different transport service providers, and competition between different distribution channels to choose from – which is why it is important to avoid ‘walled gardens’ and to ensure an open, multi-player transport service operator and MDMS market.

🔗 EPF’s position paper on MDMS, available here