Ticket Prices of Planes Vs Trains: A Europe-Wide Analysis

Summary

In the majority (79 out of 112) of routes analysed, flights are less expensive than rail. Rail trips are on average twice as expensive as flights, despite the fact that the overall climate impact of flying can be over 80 times worse than taking a train.
On the 112 routes analysed, only 23 of them are (almost) always cheaper by train than by plane. And only half of them are decent train trips, the others having really bad or slow train connections, such as Tallinn–Riga and Warsaw–Ljubljana. 16 of these 23 routes are not served by low-cost carriers, such as Zurich–Vienna and Brussels– Hamburg, 6 of these 23 routes do not have any direct flight at all, such as Berlin–Prague and Ljubljana–Milan.
With a train ticket costing up to 30 times the price of the flight for a trip on the same day, Barcelona–London is the route showing the highest price difference in this analysis. Some of the routes between major European cities, such as London–Bratislava (15.5 times), Budapest–Brussels (12.5 times), Madrid–Brussels (15 times), Valencia– Paris (12 times) or Rome-Vienna (10.2 times) show high price differences as well.
Countries with the most expensive train tickets compared to flights are the UK, Spain, Belgium, France and Italy. Whereas in Central and Eastern Europe, trains are more often cheaper in relation to flights than in Western Europe. However, train frequency, speed, connections and services are usually worse than in western countries.
Some really effective train routes such as Amsterdam–London, London–Edinburgh and Toulouse–Paris (4 to 4.5 hours by train each) are still among the Top 43 most popular short-haul flights in Europe. On these routes, flights remain much cheaper.
Low-cost carriers are all over Europe: they operate 79% of all routes analysed. For another 12% of the routes analysed, transfer flights operated by these companies are the cheapest flight option.
These transfer flights are also by far the most polluting options, causing up to 10 times more greenhouse gas emissions than already polluting direct flights according to our calculations. This climate-wrecking practice suggests travellers go from Budapest to Paris via Bergamo, from Luxembourg to Milan via London, from Madrid to Zurich via Barcelona, or from Marseille to Berlin via Copenhagen.
With their unfair and aggressive pricing strategies, easyJet, Ryanair, Wizz Air, Volotea and other low-cost airlines offer the lowest prices, and are in almost all cases cheaper than rail. They are frequently offering extremely low prices, obviously even below the costs for airport and ticket fees. The cheapest ticket found costs €9.99, and was sold by Ryanair.
Rail trips are more expensive, the more different rail companies are involved in the trip, and the more separate tickets have to be bought for different parts of the trip. The price may also vary from one operator to another.
Because less transfers and/or less different train operators are involved, night trains are often cheaper than day trains. But they remain usually more expensive than low-cost airlines.
Some railway companies do not offer tickets for a longer period than 2 or 3 months in advance: CFR (Romania), VY (Norway), PKP (Poland)... This creates another advantage for airlines that always sell tickets for the period analysed.

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What it covers

Introduction
Key Findings
Methodology in Brief
Overall Results
Detailed Results per Country and Route
1. Austria
2. The Baltics
3. Belgium
4. Bulgaria
5. Croatia
6. Czech Republic
7. Denmark
8. Finland
9. France
10. Germany
11. Greece
12. Hungary
13. Italy
14. Luxembourg
15. Netherlands
16. Norway
17. Poland
18. Portugal
19. Romania
20. Slovakia
21. Slovenia
22. Spain
23. Sweden
24. Switzerland
25. United Kingdom
An Unfair Regulatory Playing Field
Conclusions
Greenpeace Demands
Annex I: Details of the Methodology
Annex II: Sources and Links
Annex III: Dataset