London startup Loco2.com has today launched the first pan-European rail booking service that integrates buying train tickets from any UK station travelling to thousands of European destinations into a single transaction. "Our mission is to make booking a train in Europe as easy as booking a flight," states the company's Twitter bio, and it seems that the company, which was set up in 2006, has finally achieved what it set out to. Travellers can now book seamlessly combine fares for British, French and German trains -- and that even incorporates high-speed services such as Eurostar, TGV and ICE. "Loco2 has achieved something remarkable. For the first time, you can enter the name of your local station, however small and insignificant it is, then enter Amsterdam or Venice or Lucerne or Berlin or Barcelona or Copenhagen and it'll work out (and book) all your trains," says rail travel expert Mark Smith, otherwise known as the Man in Seat 61.
Rail passengers will also be ensured that they are protected by the same rights as air passengers, in that if their journey begins outside of London a ticket from "London International CIV" will automatically be selected and entitle them to travel on a later Eurostar if they miss the one they were booked on to due to UK train delays. These tickets can already be bought from within the UK, but so few people know about them that they are rarely purchased; Loco2, however, wants to make sure you don't miss out.
With limited exceptions due to exchange, Loco2.com won't charge you any additional booking fees and offers print-at-home and collect-at-station tickets for the UK, France and Germany. Although Loco2 was primarily designed for international travel bookings, it can also be used to book journeys within the UK -- making it a welcome alternative to some mainstream domestic services that do charge booking fees.
Booking international train travel for journeys originating in the UK, but going beyond the reach of Eurostar services has until now been a fiddly process, requiring users to use multiple services. At the root of the problem has been data, wrote Jamie Andrews, co-founder and MD of Loco2 in a guest post for Wired.co.uk back in 2011.
The process of knitting together the rail booking services across Europe has been a lengthy and arduous one for Andrews, but no doubt the reward for him will be delivered in the form of many grateful customers. First he had to go about persuading the relevant authorities to give him access to the booking and timetabling systems for SNCF and Deutsche Bahn -- the national rail operators of France and Germany respectively.
The final step was integrating the data from the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) in Britain. There is already coordination between French and German networks through at least one booking service, but Loco2 is the first service to throw the UK into the mix. Thanks to campaigns over the last few years, the data in the UK was already fairly open and accessible, but there were other, more technical challenges to overcome, Andrews tells Wired.co.uk "Our software is integrated with different rail operator booking systems (including ATOC in the UK), and so the main issue for us has been obtaining access to relevant APIs as opposed to accessing the raw datasets. Thankfully access to APIs has opened up significantly since I wrote the guest post in 2011, and this has enabled us to improve things significantly for customers, culminating in our launch of UK rail today."
The service is currently less comprehensive across Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and a number of other countries. Despite new licensing frameworks that should persuade networks to ease access to data, some vital information is still being withheld, preventing Loco2 from always returning complete itineraries to more far-flung European destinations, says Andrews. "The operators remain nervous about following through and actually providing access to the data. This nervousness is understandable, and we agree that the risk of confusing users with incorrect data needs to be minimised. Nevertheless we are concerned that larger companies (e.g. Google or TheTrainline) may benefit at the expense of startups like ourselves unless the data and related APIs are opened up in a genuinely fair way."
Behind the exercise of bringing the booking process for rail travel in line with that for air travel lingers an environmentally friendly conscience. From the start, the aim of Loco2 -- which stands for low CO2 -- has been to make taking the train a more attractive alternative to flying.
The pleasures, relative ease and environmental benefits of international train travel are evident to many, but the added incentive of integrated booking processes hopefully will encourage more people to take the train rather than fly. Handily, Loco2.com also offers in-depth rail guides that provide information about various destinations and train services to simplify the process even further. Now all we need is for the UK to sort out its ticket pricing. "Outside of data access issues, we have learnt a lot about the structure of UK fares versus those of our European counterparts.
There is a lot of complexity to deal with, and in particular the way that return fares in the UK are structured is confusingly complex versus how they are handled across Europe. This complexity has been acknowledged at a regulatory level and we would welcome the simplification of this and other issues," says Andrews.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
