Rail Europe celebrates 90 years of promoting train travel - India's Top Travel News Source: TravelBiz Monitor
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Rail Europe celebrates 90 years of promoting train travel

Commemorating its 90 year of business operations this year, Rail Europe, founded in 1932 has extended its network from a niche brand promoting French rail routes to North American travellers, to becoming the largest one-stop-shop for planning and booking European train travel.

To celebrate this milestone, Rail Europe has launched a B2B booking platform, Easy Rail Access – ERA that offers the largest catalog of 60+ European train operators (including SNCF, SBB, Eurostar, Thalys, Lyria, Trenitalia, Italo, DB, Renfe, OUIGO Spain and NATIONAL RAIL) and rail passes, such as the Swiss Travel Pass and the Eurail Pass.

This brand new B2B platform offers a unique & seamless experience to plan & book rail travel to the travel professionals. It allows them to access new features including the full range of fares, multiple payment options & currencies, and after-sales processing.

Srijit Nair, General Manager, India, Middle East, Africa & Russia, Rail Europe

“Into our 90th year of operation in 2022, we are glad to say that we are the business and technology partner of more than 20,000 travel professionals in 70 countries. As a part of the 90th anniversary, at the start of the year, we had many promotional offers which included up to 50% off on some journeys in partnership with top European rail operators,” Srijit Nair, General Manager, India, Middle East, Africa & Russia, Rail Europe.

Currently, there are offers going on for Eurostar and Eurail. Travel professionals can avail 20% discount on Standard Premier Class bookings on Eurostar till July 17, and 15% off on all Eurail Global Mobile Passes till the end of July 2022. More such offers will be rolled out in the coming months of the year.

As the business is growing and markets are opening for travel, 2022 is the year of opportunities and growth. “Our focus this year is to make our B2B booking portal ERA – Easy Rail Access, more convenient for our GSAs and partners who are booking with our GSAs as well as those booking directly on our B2B platform agent.raileurope.com. So, on the technology front, we are continuously adding lot of new rail sectors and products and want to bring passholder fares, seat reservations for scenic trains in Switzerland and more sectors on point-to-point tickets on our B2B portal soon. We are in the process of updating our portals with such technological innovations and determined to make it available for our partners by the start of the year 2023,” he said.

Rail Europe conducts series of webinars and trainings for our partners on a time-to-time basis. “We also have our e-learning programme The Rail Agent Course (TRAC) which is comprehensive rail training programme which includes Europe’s major train operators, that is also available on a dedicated app. Travel agents and partners can register and complete the assigned modules, complete the contests and win prizes. After completing the course agents can earn The Rail Expert certificate. We are also updating this programme with more rail carriers’ modules. It is a fully equipped Rail Certification programme that travel agents can participate in to increase their knowledge about European trains and passes. The e-learning program is available at: www.trac-raileurope.com,” he stated.

In the Indian market, Rail Europe is seeing a pent-up demand for leisure and family trips for Europe and Indians love travelling to Switzerland and France. Therefore, there is an increase in demand for Swiss passes along with French train SNCF and Swiss France connecting train – TGV Lyria. Italian train – Trenitalia as well as trains in UK are also seeing rise in demand.

 

 

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