Evolvi announced it was adding international rail<\/a> including SNCF, Eurostar and Deutsche Bahn to its API, expanding the rail company\u2019s offering to TMCs and online booking tools, who can now avoid having direct contracts with individual operators.<\/p>\nDarren Williams, Evolvi\u2019s managing director, says, \u201cNearly all our customers are TMCs, so you’ve got a very finite pool. Unless we can widen the breadth of our product, we’re not going to be appealing. You have to do that to be able to stay relevant and grow.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says APIs have revolutionised access to rail content. \u201cWith the first rail APIs you could connect, but it was hard. Things in that world have improved. It’s now a lot easier and there is a lot more flexibility,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In September, Trainline Partner Solutions (TPS), the rail booking provider\u2019s B2B arm, announced that it was extending its 10-year contract with American Express Global Business Travel to the TMC\u2019s clients in the EU. Corporates will have access to online booking and after sales, train seat maps, split ticketing in the UK, and carbon emission calculations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Amadeus’ Cytric booking tool has recently integrated APIs from Deutsche Bahn, SNCF, \u00d6BB and Ouigo.\u00a0How does this all translate to what buyers can see in their online booking tools?<\/p>\n
\u201cThings have improved over the past 18 months,\u201d says Raj Sachdave, managing partner of Black Box Partnerships. \u201cThe OBTs\u2019 roadmaps show they have now made a decision on where they’re getting content from. I don’t think that net benefit has made its way through to the traveller yet. The next six to nine months are going to be really pivotal in showing the value of all that work, for example in the availability of seat maps and split ticketing.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the improvement in rail content availability, Sachdave believes that better comparison metrics will be required, particularly as everyone is talking about the role of AI in rail booking.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere needs to be a smarter biasing matrix in 2026 from the OBTs which is a lot more creative in terms of taking the fixed policy parameters of the travel programme and working with dynamic pricing, sustainability, the well-being matrix and bringing those into the fold,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Attend any rail travel session at a corporate travel conference and the chances are that the discussion will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,16648,184688],"class_list":{"0":"post-585767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-ground-transport","12":"tag-ground-transport-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115590664429195632","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}