Travel agent bookings with International Rail for the 2016 European peak season are booming, with sales up by 25 per cent on the same period last year.
IR chief executive Jonathan Hume said the increase was due in part to new booking processes and technology, which has made increasingly complex rail schedules and ticket types more agent-friendly.
“This involves new live bookings to reduce time consuming and frustrating procedures for agents with the IR booking site doing all the hard work,” said Hume.
“Agents appreciate that we make rail easy to book whilst the product is getting more complicated. For complex itineraries, we ask agents to send the client’s itinerary to us and we do the hard work of comparing rail passes to point to point tickets.
“While for straightforward point to point bookings, we have launched a brand new live connection to the European Railways, which has opened up live bookings for major trains in popular countries such as Italy, France, and Germany, as well as key cross border trains such as Thalys and Eurostar.”
The majority of tickets are issued by email, which further simplifies the process.
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