BRUSSELS, Belgium — If you’re considering train travel in Europe, you can expect to do well in Italy. On Eurostar, it’s another matter.
Italy’s Trenitalia is the best rail passenger operator in Europe, while Eurostar — the international operator linking London to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris — is the worst overall, according to rankings released this month by Transport and Environment, an advocacy group for clean transportation.
The group’s report ranks 27 operators on eight factors such as punctuality, ticket prices, traveler experience and the offering of night trains (considered a key environmental option to decrease flying). It found that only 11 of the 27 companies had on-time performance as high as 80%.
Ranked on a 10-point scale, Trenitalia finished first with a score of 7.7, followed by Switzerland’s SBB and private Czech-based company RegioJet, both at 7.4. The Italian operator received the top score of 10 for offering special fares and price reductions, and also scored highly for booking experience, traveler experience, and its night-train offerings.
SBB was most reliable, was ranked has having the best booking experience, and shared the top spot for bike-friendly service with Belgium’s SNCB, but was marked down for having one of the lower ranking policies for compensating customers in case of service issues. RegioJet scored 7.5 or better in five categories — price, special fares, booking experience, compensation policies, and traveler experience — but scored low for its bike policies.
Eurostar, at 4.9, was the only company to score below 5. It was hurt by finishing 26th in pricing — charging nearly twice the European average, measured by Euros per kilometer — as well as having a low scores in reliability and zeros for night trains and its bike policy.
A Eurostar representative told British newspaper The Guardian that it had updated booking and cycling policies, and relaunched a discount-ticket program, since the data was gathered: “We are confident that if this report were redone again, the scores would be higher.”
Finishing just head of Eurostar at the bottom of the rankings were Greece’s Hellenic Trains and Ouigo, the discount operator run by France’s SNCF.
Two of the companies in the rankings do not make on-time performance information public. Among those that do, Germany’s Deutsche Bahn — which has had well-reported operational issues for several years — finished ahead of only Portugal’s CP and new Swedish operator Snälltåget.
The full report, which includes tables that rank companies in the key categories and a full list of their scores in all eight areas, is available here.
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