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The new ranking, unveiled today by T&E, evaluates 27 rail operators across eight criteria, including ticket prices, reliability and onboard amenities. Trenitalia, SBB, and RegioJet get the best grades. Trenitalia stands out for its travel experience, SBB is the most punctual operator in Europe and RegioJet has some of the most affordable tickets. In contrast, Eurostar’s low ranking reflects its steep prices and poor reliability score. The results underline the need for industry-wide reforms to elevate Europe’s rail services.
Affordability is key for passengers choosing rail for long-distance travel [2], but T&E’s analysis shows some major operators fall short. Deutsche Bahn (DB), SNCF and Eurostar rank poorly in pricing, which accounts for 25% of the final score. Special fares, like discounts for families and specific age groups, can make rail more accessible. In this category, worth 15% of the ranking, top marks go to BDZ (Bulgaria), CP (Portugal), Hellenic Trains (Greece), SJ (Sweden), and Italian operators Italo and Trenitalia.
Reliability and ease of booking, also worth 15% of the ranking, are key to enhancing passenger experience and can encourage adoption of this low-carbon transport mode. Swiss SBB, Belgium’s SNCB, and Spain’s Renfe lead in reliability, while Germany’s DB, Portugal’s CP, and Sweden’s Snälltåget rank lowest. Only 11 of 27 operators achieve punctuality rates above 80%. As for booking experience — including how long in advance tickets are offered and if external platforms can sell them — SBB tops the list, followed by Germany’s DB and Austria’s ÖBB.
Victor Thévenet, rail policy manager at T&E, says: “Sky-high ticket prices are driving passengers away from trains. To unlock rail's full potential, we must make tickets more affordable. This is a shared responsibility between the industry and governments. Rail operators need to set customer-friendly fares, while Member States and the EU should ensure fair competition and lower rail tolls. That's the ticket to making train travel accessible to all Europeans."
Further analysis by T&E from the final ranking shows that higher prices don’t guarantee better service [3]. ÖBB and Trenitalia offer some of the best price-to-quality ratios in Europe, while Eurostar and Avanti charge high fares but deliver subpar services.
T&E’s ranking comes amid growing consensus about the necessity of improving rail services in Europe [4]. EU Commission President von der Leyen recently committed to proposing a new Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation that would allow travellers to easily book tickets across countries and operators without the fear of missing connections [5]. She instructed her Candidate Commissioner for Sustainable Transport to do so and during his hearing promised to deliver this soon. The work on the coming EU budget and the future review of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), Europe’s main funding programme for transport infrastructure, offers a good opportunity to also target EU rail investments towards maintenance, upgrade and digitalisation of rail infrastructure.
Victor Thévenet adds: “The EU has opened a window of opportunity to finally mandate that train companies share their tickets with booking platforms to enable cross-border booking in just one click. Together with the roll-out of the European standard for command and control system ERTMS, which will increase train capacity and punctuality, these regulations have the potential to make rail more reliable and easier to use. It is now time for the Commission to show these are not empty promises.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
[1] Data comes from publicly available sources, mostly from annual reports of train companies and their websites and from governmental organisations. To analyse prices, more than 8,000 tickets were tracked. Rail operators were contacted to review the data collected and T&E gathered replies from five of them.
[2] McKinsey (2022). Boosting passenger preference for rail. Accessed: link.
[3] T&E has compared the pricing category and the other seven categories together and concluded that the most expensive operators are not the ones with the highest scores.
[4] Enrico Letta (2024). Much More Than a Market. Accessed: link.
[5] Ursula von der Leyen (2024). Europe’s choice. Political guidelines 2024-2029. Accessed: link.
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