Every year, when the time comes to organize the trip home for the holidays, many of us find ourselves in front of the PC screen consulting ticket prices and choosing whether to take the train or plane. Those who have already done so will have noticed that, this year too, generally, Train tickets cost much more than plane ticketsand Italy is in fifth place in the ranking of European countries with the greatest cost difference between the two types of travel for the same route.
But this does not only apply to Italy: in Europe, 71% of the time taking the plane costs less than the train: to be precise, on average the train costs doubleand some rail routes can cost up to 30 times more than flying. This is confirmed by one of the latest Greenpeace reports, which compared the cost of airline and train tickets 112 different European routes.
But why does the train cost more?? Why aren’t there incentives and discounts to travel on tracks if trains pollute less? There are many factors that determine higher costs for railway routes.
The reasons why trains cost more than planes
Train tickets cost more than plane tickets due to a series of factors: high costs of managing the railway infrastructure and the lack of tax breaks.
Building and having to constantly maintain the hundreds of thousands of kilometers of infrastructure (tracks, stations, electrification and safety systems, signs, etc.) scattered throughout Italy has a significant fixed cost for RFI, while the management of the trains (therefore the service) is the responsibility of operators such as Trenitalia, who also have to cover the costs of the personnel, who are very numerous and scattered throughout the country.
From an infrastructural point of view, the airports they are certainly not cheap, but being concentrated in specific points and having no infrastructure – the flights take place in an airspace managed via software, radar and controllers – the costs are much more limited compared to thousands of kilometers of physical tracks.
Furthermore, the airlines they can afford to offer much lower prices because They don’t pay fuel taxes due to international treaties that prevent Member States from imposing taxes on jet fuel used on country-to-country flights. This decision was made during the Chicago Convention of 1944with the aim of encouraging the growth of this sector. Clearly, not paying excise duty and VAT on fuel means that aviation enjoys a strong tax break which allows it to offer tickets at prices that are often lower than those of trains. The low-cost airlinestherefore, they benefit from an exemption designed 80 years ago and in a decidedly different context.
Another important piece must then be added: i international passenger flights in the EU I am exempt from VAT (this means that, for passengers, international airline tickets are sold without adding VAT), which is not the case for trains. Here too, the reason dates back to the post-war period: trains were not, in fact, included in the international agreements, and unlike what happened in the aviation sector, a global convention on “international rail transport” has never existed. This explains why there is no European legislation that exempts train tickets from VAT. In all likelihood, the reason for this choice lies in the fact that historically the train has always been seen as national transportand even after the Second World War the vision did not change: the train remained a taxable service like other internal services for all the states of the Union.
Eighty years have passed, but why haven’t European states changed things? There are mainly two reasons: in addition to the fact that the international aviation lobby is stronger and governments try to continue to favor it to maintain their tourism revenues, states choose not to change things because they fear losing important tax revenues.
In short, to summarize, in addition to the situation that remained almost a century ago, it is above all the fixed costs of the railway sector that mean that train tickets, in some way, generally cost more than plane tickets.
Different commercial strategies depending on the means of transport
Then there is a final question, that of commercial strategies.
Airlines compete with each other on almost every route. To stay on the market, therefore, they must fill every available place by continually adapting rates to demandand to do this they need advanced pricing systems:
- Yield management: varies prices based on expected demand to maximize the filling of seats
- Revenue management: optimize total revenue by combining pricing, seat availability and customer segments
- Predictive algorithms: thanks to their databases they acquire millions of data (on travellers’ habits, past bookings, etc.) and analyze large quantities of data to predict future demand and adapt prices accordingly
- Segmented bookings: offer different rates to different groups of customers (e.g last minute) to maximize revenue
It is precisely the combination of these systems that allows companies to offer a range of particularly dynamic prices and sometimes extremely convenient for those looking for a flight. Dynamic prices that the railway sector cannot apply with the same intensity, given that it operates in a less competitive market and with lower margins.
Furthermore, the airline industry can also take advantage of theoverbookingthat is, selling more tickets than actual seats because it is expected that some passengers will not show up. An advantageous system, given that the objective is to fill all the seats before the plane leaves. The train, however, by making more stops, works differently: the empty seats can be filled in the subsequent stops, and standing passengers can also be accommodated (in the case of regional and intercity trains), and not providing assigned seat for many routes it makes no sense to “sell more seats”. In the case of high-speed routes, however, the seats are assigned, and the tune changes: in that case the companies can exploit (limitedly) the aforementioned yield management.
Speaking of high-speed trainsthe positive thing is the fact that there is a competitive system: in Italy, for example, we have both Trenitalia and Italo, for example, and this leads to a greater availability of low cost offers.
What can the European Union do about it
The train is comfortable, it saves us from traveling to the airport and a whole series of checks, and it is more sustainable from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions. Just think that, just to give an example, a flight Milan-Berlin it emits 141 kilos of greenhouse gases, while the train for the same route emits none 33. But despite the obvious positive effect on the environment and the various conveniences, as we have seen, things have not changed in many years.
To address this situation, the European Union had hypothesized to review aviation fuel exemptionsbut the airlines (as could be expected, after all), have become more rigid, stating that an increase in costs would be reflected in the price of tickets. Yet, this would be the first step to bring the prices of trains and planes closer together, rebalancing a situation that is decidedly unbalanced at the moment.
Greenpeace has proposed that the EU introduce the “climate tickets“, i.e. long-term tickets, cheap and easy to use, valid on all public transport in a country or region, including trains and cross-border transport. The idea comes from German D-ticketwhich allows you to travel anywhere in the country with a subscription of just 58 euros per month, which will increase from 2026, reaching 63 euros. Measure that can be financed by taxing the extra profits of oil companies, eliminating subsidies for companies that are harmful to the environment and putting an end to tax exemptions for aviation fuel.
