In exactly ten minutes, three trains leave for Madrid from Barcelona’s Sants station. First, a double composition Ouigo with more than a thousand seats. Shortly after, an Iryo still shiny and smelling new inside. Finally, the oldest, the Renfe AVE, which today celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the connection between the two large Spanish cities in a very different context from that found in 2008.
If at that time Renfe’s competition was the airlift between El Prat and Barajas, now you can look at it out of the corner of your eye on the next platform. The train has become the means of transport chosen in a majority way compared to the plane. For every person who flies, three do so by rail. The preponderance of the train ahead of the plane has been going on for a decade. And it continued to gain users and market share thanks to the new variable pricing policy that Renfe launched in February 2013. That was the case until the pandemic hit, which brought about a drastic drop. In full recovery, it has once again gained momentum thanks to the liberalization of the sector promoted by the European Union, officially opened in December 2020, and which has accommodated three different operators in the Barcelona-Madrid corridor, the most profitable in across the country and the first the competition entered.
On any given day, 27 Renfe trains leave Sants for Madrid -23 with the AVE brand and four with the low-cost Avlo-, twelve from Iryo and five from Ouigo. In total, 44 convoys, an average of one every little more than half an hour. They far exceed the 17 with which it began 15 years ago and the flights that the airlift offered in its heyday and that is now trying to be reinforced to survive in front of a railway that in the morning rush hour can offer up to five trains in less than an hour.
The offer right now is so great that it exceeds the demand, and that at the end of 2022 the number of passengers registered monthly before the pandemic was already exceeded, despite the fact that overall for the year it is still below that of 2019. It is expected that 2023 will already be clearly above. If the passenger statistics are observed, a direct relationship can be established between the downward trend in the cost of tickets and the upward trend in the number of passengers. According to data from the Trainline ticket sales platform, prices in the last quarter of last year were 43% lower than in the same period of the pre-pandemic 2019, going from an average of 81 euros to 46. This has translated into a volume of users never seen in the previous fifteen years.
“The entry of competitors has made us enter into a price war,” acknowledges Ricardo Rivera, head of Renfe’s services in the Madrid-Barcelona corridor, although he is quick to clarify that “it is not comparable to the strategies of the airlines” . Perhaps they have not been able to sell them for less than the cost of a single metro ticket, but it is easy to find them for less than 20 euros, even during the most popular times and days.
The incorporation of Iryo on November 25 has definitely shaken the market. It started with six daily frequencies per direction and since ten days it has gone to twelve. In June, the intention of this company, owned by Air Nostrum, Trenitalia and Globalvía, is to arrive at fifteen. Its CEO, Simone Gorini, has set himself the goal of “reaching 30% of the passenger share this year”.
That 30% barrier is the percentage that touched in 2022 Ouigo, the low-cost trains of the French SNCF, which have been in this corridor since May 2021. This is stated in the report of the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) in the third quarter, which places its share at 29.4%. Renfe’s classic AVE is left with 56.5% and the simplest option of the Spanish public company, the Avlo -in service since June 2021-, concentrates 14.1%. The newcomer Iryo still does not appear in data that shows how the global number of rail users is growing, an aspect that has significant environmental repercussions, with emissions much lower than those of planes or cars.
The “train war”, as Renfe baptized it to welcome the competition almost two years ago, has turned into a price war and that, in turn, has translated into an important change in the landscape that can be find inside the wagons. When the AVE was released fifteen years ago, the suit and tie could practically be considered an official uniform for boarding the train. The image is different today. “We have generated new travelers. We are proud to see trains full of families going on vacation, students who couldn’t afford it before and all kinds of self-employed workers”, highlights Federico Pareja, commercial director of Ouigo in Spain.
The price reduction is the fundamental aspect that has promoted the democratization of the high-speed train, but at the same time it is causing significant losses for the operators. The subsidiary of the French public operator SNCF left 31.7 million euros in Spain last year. It is unknown how long they will be able to hold out like this, although, in the long run, they will have no choice but to increase prices if the companies want to make a profit from the high costs of electricity and the fees they pay to the railway infrastructure manager.
In turn, the current situation is quite a challenge for Sants station, which is approaching the limit of its capacity and the need to open La Sagrera station is pressing, for which it will still be necessary to wait a few years. On the platforms, every minute counts for logistical tasks and time is squeezed to the maximum. In the lobby, the space previously occupied by shops and seats has now given way to new access controls that still prove insufficient when three or four trains coincide in a short period of time. Inside, the long queues of passengers about to board are organized as best they can and Adif studies how to fit all the pieces together, although the space is what it is and there is not much room for manoeuvre.
