Its president believes that the coexistence of the train with the plane can be done without conflict
MADRID, 14 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Renfe will launch its services soon in France with prices that will start at 29 euros on the line from Madrid to Marseille and from 19 euros on the line that will link Barcelona with Lyon, lowering the journeys that will link the French cities to 9 euros.
The president of the public company, Raül Blanco, has announced in a ‘Five Days’ conference the main lines of the pricing policy that he will implement upon his arrival in France, a country in which, with these prices, he wants to become an operator of reference, in direct competition with the national company SNCF, which in Spain already operates through Ouigo.
“With this resolute, determined policy, starting in this case in France, we have a clear objective, which is to reach Paris, but also with the intention of taking advantage of all the opportunities that this change offers,” Blanco said.
The manager has advanced that the inauguration of these lines will be “shortly, in a few weeks”, since they are only pending the latest technical details: “it will take very little”, he has ruled in this regard.
Blanco has pointed to liberalization as the main current challenge for the company, and to which he will respond with actions to strengthen both internally and externally, maintaining levels of quality, punctuality, investment (245 million in the last five years), capital human (already reaches a workforce of 16,000 people with an average age of 44 years, five below 2018) and digitization.
“This is a very competitive initial phase of liberalization, which is being good for the economy and for users, but for the incumbent company (Renfe) it represents a great challenge. The process is curious, because we are competing with public monopolies of neighboring countries (SNCF and Trenitalia)”, he added.
For this reason, it also aims to gain market share internationally, for which it has already set up its subsidiary Renfe Proyectos Internacionales to consolidate the projects it already has underway, such as Leo Express in central and eastern Europe, in Arabia with the Haramain project (already accumulates more than 800,000 passengers) and in France.
Regarding the coexistence between the train and the plane, the president of Renfe has opted for intermodality between both means of transport: “The combination of the different modes with the plane, especially by feeding more routes, can be done without conflict “.
In this sense, he has cited some intermodal alliances such as the one signed with Iberia to feed regional Renfe connections with international flights or with Costa Cruises to do the same but in the maritime field.
In any case, Blanco has qualified that in countries where measures have been taken in this area in short-haul flights, such as France, it has affected only 5% of flights, which were also no longer in operation or were in decline, for what he believes is more “an aesthetic measure with a relative impact.”
