HŽ against Brussels: One Ticket for Europe Sparks Strong Opposition

From Zagreb, trains can directly reach only a few European destinations — Vienna, Budapest, Munich, or Ljubljana, and even those train journeys take painstakingly long. It takes almost seven hours to travel to Vienna and Budapest, nine hours to Munich, and due to construction work on the tracks, over three hours to neighboring Ljubljana.

If you want to extend your journey from these hubs to Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome, you enter a true logistical and legal adventure. First, you must search for ticket purchasing services for individual operators and buy a separate ticket from each, as the system HŽ Passenger Transport does not communicate with either the Italian or French railways.

Then you have to transfer, relying on the communication of the operators because, if you do not have the apps of all operators, you do not receive push notifications… This is how problems arise; if the first train is delayed and you miss your connection, you are left to fend for yourself. There is no right to free continuation of travel, accommodation, or compensation.

Abolishing Transport Fragmentation

The European Commission has initiated legal changes to abolish such transport fragmentation and has presented a new package of rules ‘One journey, one ticket, full rights’.

Three new legislative proposals are on the table: on multimodal reservations, ticket sales, and passenger protection with a unified ticket, all of which bring radical changes to how Europeans will plan, pay for, and realize cross-border travel.

The key innovation is the introduction of an obligation that journeys involving multiple different railway operators must be purchasable in one transaction on a platform of the passenger’s choice, whether it is independent services like Trainline or the services of the carriers themselves.

The most important breakthrough relates to legal security during transfers. When a passenger with a unified ticket misses a connection due to the delay of the first train, they receive full protection, from free rerouting to the next train and covered accommodation to the right to a refund for the entire route. Additionally, platforms will have to display all options neutrally and offer the possibility of sorting lines by greenhouse gas emissions.

A Fierce Lobbying War

However, behind this idea, a fierce lobbying and political war has already erupted in Brussels. While consumer associations and the travel-tech sector welcome the initiative as a break from monopolistic practices, national railway giants gathered in the association CER (Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies), the main Brussels lobbying association that includes over 70 leading national railway companies and infrastructure managers in Europe, including Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, France’s SNCF, and Croatia’s HŽ, are providing strong resistance.

The main point of contention lies in the obligation to open sales and traffic data in real-time and to enter into non-discriminatory contracts with private intermediaries. Large operators, including HŽ Passenger Transport, argue that handing over sales to independent platforms would expose the sector to high commissions at a time when massive investments in infrastructure and vehicles are needed, while in the background, a struggle for control over passenger data is actually taking place.

For smaller and technologically less developed railway markets like Croatia’s, this package brings not only challenges but also opportunities, as Croatia has been a blind spot on the railway map of Europe for decades, which, among other things, means it is poorly visible in European search engines.

HŽ Without Data Integration

One reason is that HŽ Passenger Transport does not have fully integrated data with large European systems. Mandatory inclusion on unified platforms would provide Croatian railways with direct visibility to millions of European passengers and tourists.

However, a key prerequisite for this is the accelerated implementation of the Directive on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and the establishment of National Access Points where data must be shared in real-time. For HŽ, this represents a serious technological test that requires urgent modernization of IT infrastructure.

However, until these challenges are addressed, the greatest tangible benefit for the domestic market could arise from provisions on multimodality. Integration of railway and bus transport. This would enable the purchase of a unified ticket that combines a train from Europe to Zagreb and bus transport to Adriatic destinations.

The legislative proposals are now entering the regular co-decision procedure in the European Parliament and the EU Council. If the proposal is adopted without significant dilution, which is unlikely, after a transitional period of one to two years, traveling across Europe with one ticket in hand could become a reality.