Transport.The French SNCF breaks Renfe prices and promises to reduce tickets by 50% with Ouigo, its 'low cost' AVE
Competition. Promotion chooses the French SNCF and Air Nostrum as Rivals of Renfe to compete in the AVE
French railway company
SNCF
announced Tuesday the arrival in Spain of
Ouigo
, its
service high -
speed trains 'lowcost',
on 15 March 2021. It
will have
five trips daily on the Madrid-Zaragoza-Tarragona-Barcelona route
.
The train fleet will add 14 units, that is,
7,196 seats per day.
In the longer term, the intention is to scale this offer up to 30,000 places per day.
SNCF thus specifies its plans to enter the Spanish long distance market and compete with Renfe, after the
liberalization of the sector was
decreed
for 2020. The French company signed an agreement with Adif in April, although in November it had already taken a first step by being awarded five daily round trips between Madrid and Catalonia, five between Madrid and the Valencia region and another five between Madrid and Andalusia.
The service to be offered by the company will be
a low-cost high-speed train
that has been operating in France since April 2013. The idea arose during the Great Recession, in a context of low profitability for conventional long-distance service (
TGV
) and It consists of
applying the model of low-cost airlines to the
long-distance passenger
rail service
.
There is a charge for luggage beyond a suitcase and a handbag, the seats have less space and there are 20% more seats when business class and the bar car are eliminated.
The trains used by the service in the Gallic country are in line with Ouigo's intention to maximize the use of space.
The Alstom TGV Duplexes reach 320km / h and have 512 seats
distributed between the
two floors
that make up each wagon.
In the busiest lines the seats are doubled with a double train.
The 103 series of Ave (Siemens) that covers the Madrid-Barcelona route offers 404 seats with a maximum speed of 350km / h.
50% lower prices
To promote Ouigo in Spain,
the firm has launched 10,000 Madrid-Barcelona trips for one euro
for those who buy through the web.
Hélène Valenzuela,
director of
Ouigo Spain
, assured that after the promotion prices "on average will be
50% below current prices
."
To the north of the Pyrenees, a low-cost trip is charged 10 euros on the least crowded dates and hours and can reach 25 at specific times.
The arrival of Ouigo will mean the
creation of "more than 1,300
direct and indirect
jobs
in Spain", especially linked to the maintenance of trains, said
Alain Krakovitch
, the CEO of
Voyages SNCF,
The executive thinks that Spain has room "for more trains" because the country has the second network of high-speed lines in the world behind China, but they are underused.
The French firm is not the only company interested in competing with Renfe, which until March will be the only company to operate Adif's high-speed infrastructures.
The Spanish-Italian consortium
Intermodalidad de Levante SA (ILSA)
intends to operate from 2022, although it has not specified its plans.
To fight Ouigo,
Renfe designed AVLO
, its own
'low cost' service
, which offered Madrid-Barcelona trips at 5 euros and had its own purple Talgo trains.
However, its implementation has been suspended due to the pandemic.
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InterviewHélène Valenzuela: "Ouigo is not a shabby project: our trains have space and prices will always be lower than those of Renfe"
The French SNCF breaks Renfe prices and promises to reduce tickets by 50% with Ouigo, its 'low cost' AVE
Spain "The train was bouncing for a while. We were just waiting for the moment of impact"
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