Spain railway network Renfe’s President on reducing train ticket prices

The president of Renfe, Isaias Taboas, spoke on reducing passenger fees so as to benefit the increase in train passengers and also the recovery of passengers in Spain.

Renfe’s President Taboas put the figure at a 16% drop in business travel train passengers in Spain, when comparing March 2022 with March 2019, before the pandemic, as reported by ElMundo.

Taboas made these statements at an Executive Forum breakfast briefing in which he explained the challenges facing Renfe in the face of market liberalisation:

“If we have to copy something from the competition, we will do it, but we will fight with our own weapons. What we are not going to do is just throw away prices for the sake of it.”

“If you sell tickets at €10 you have to fill the trains and make sure that everything fits together so that you don’t lose money per train. You can make money or you can breakeven, but you can never make a loss on your trips”.

In this sense, in order to be competitive, Taboas asked for a reduction in the fee that Renfe pays per user. “The fee per passenger is 53 per cent in Avlo and 44 per cent in Renfe in Spain”. According to Taboas, in Italy the fee was lowered and there was an increase in passengers.

 “We have not been able to pass on the cost of energy to the price of tickets. The energy cost was 7 per cent and it has multiplied three times, which affects profitability,” Taboas stated.

“What we have to do is to produce energy for self-consumption and if the train does not use that energy we can pass it to the grid, so the investment needed for self-consumption would be amortised in a year and a half instead of three. But a regulatory change is necessary to be able to be self-consumers”, explained Spain’s Renfe president.

Spain’s Renfe plans to put solar panels on the roofs of the workshops to self-create the energy needed for the arduous maintenance tasks.

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