European Passengers' Federation

The attached paper contains EPF's response to the Passenger Mobility Package, focusing on the Passenger Rights proposals. Multimodal passenger rights: welcome as a first step in the right direction, but better protection needed for combined multimodal tickets. Enforcement: some improvements, but no game-changing new provisions.

The European Passengers’ Federation, representing 39 organisations from 21 countries, welcomes the EC’s initiative to review the passenger rights regulatory framework. In EPF’s perspective, the initiative needs to address a number of important issues: how to better protect passengers in a multimodal context; harmonizing and enforcing existing rules; extending current protection taking into account lessons learned…

For the European Passengers' Federation (EPF), the revision of the Air Services Regulation should address the following priority topics: 1. Price transparency. To safeguard and enhance price competition and price transparency, specific provisions are needed with regard to ancillary services.

EPF strongly welcomes the proposal to strengthen passenger protection for multi-operator rail journeys. A key improvement is that full passenger rights reimbursement, re-routing, assistance, and compensation would apply to all journeys sold as a single ticket, provided minimum connection times are respected.

The willingness of (potential) passengers to travel by rail is compromised by fears that, in the event of disruption, they may not be able to get to their final destination at the earliest available opportunity without paying additional charges. This seriously undermines passengers trust.

EPF welcomes the European Commissions review of VAT rules for passenger transport, stressing that current provisions are complex and unfairly favour high-emission modes like aviation due to zero-rating, while making rail less competitive. Despite strong public concern for the environment, cost remains a key barrier to sustainable travel choices.

EPF strongly supports the objective of enabling passengers to find, compare, combine and purchase rail tickets through the channel of their choice. The proposal pursues this through two complementary approaches: requiring railway operators to provide ticketing content including discounts , and real-time data to online ticketing providers; and obliging dominant vertically integrated rail platforms to display and sell…

The European Passengers' Federation (EPF) strongly supports ERA's work, whose mission is "Moving Europe towards a sustainable and safe railway system without frontiers". Since its establishment in 2004, ERA has made significant progress in strengthening rail safety and interoperability across the EU, and its technical achievements are widely recognised.