In Brief: GBTA releases position on the EU Passenger Package, outlining recommendations to advance seamless multimodal travel and stronger passenger protections across Europe
The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), the world’s premier business travel and meetings trade organisation, released its official position on the EU Passenger Package currently being negotiated by the EU’s legislative bodies. GBTA welcomes the proposed reforms as a significant step toward creating a more connected, integrated and passenger-focused travel experience across Europe.
The EU Passenger Package, which includes legislative proposals to simplify rail ticketing and multimodal booking, and to enhance rail passenger rights, has the potential to transform how business travellers book and manage travel across Europe involving multiple operators and modes of transport. Importantly, it will ensure travellers can more easily manage and recover from disruption during long or complex journeys.
For business travel professionals, seamless travel is more than a matter of convenience. Corporate travel programmes rely heavily on integrated booking systems to ensure traveller safety, to manage costs, to achieve sustainability goals and to ensure travellers can be assisted quickly when plans change. Fragmented booking and ticketing systems can lead to unnecessary and often costly disruptions, as well as making it harder for travellers to comply with corporate travel policies.
Fulvio Origo, Senior Director, EMEA, GBTA, said:
“For business travellers, booking the journey is only the beginning. Companies need to know where their travellers are, support them when plans change, manage costs and ensure travel stays within company policy. Europe has an opportunity to make business travel simpler and more reliable by ensuring travellers can compare, book and manage their entire journey through the channels they and their employers rely on. We look forward to working with EU policymakers and stakeholders to ensure the final legislation delivers practical outcomes for travellers, employers and the wider European economy.”
GBTA supports the European Commission’s objective of expanding access to rail content, improving the ability of travellers and travel management companies to compare rail alongside air options, strengthening competition in travel distribution, and providing travellers with greater protection when multi-operator journeys are disrupted. As outlined in its position paper, GBTA believes the three legislative proposals outlined in the EU Package should be treated as a connected framework, where content access, servicing capabilities and passenger protection work together to deliver meaningful benefits for travellers and travel managers alike.
Among the key recommendations outlined in its position paper, GBTA is urging policymakers to:
- Ensure practical, non-discriminatory access to comprehensive rail and multimodal content on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
- Give travel management companies (TMCs), online booking tools and authorised distributors servicing capabilities equivalent to supplier-direct channels, including rebooking, exchanges, cancellations and refunds.
- Preserve corporate policy-based displays and ranking, allowing companies to prioritise preferred suppliers, negotiated rates, duty-of-care obligations and sustainability objectives.
- Enable genuine multimodal functionality so travellers can meaningfully compare, book and manage air-rail and other combined journeys.
- Establish a clear principle that journeys purchased in a single transaction should be treated as one protected journey with clear responsibility and support when disruption occurs.
- Prioritise journey completion through timely rerouting, protected connections and automatic rebooking where feasible.
Fulvio Origo added:
“At the end of the day, this is about unlocking greater choice for business travellers. Rail can be an attractive, lower-emission option for many journeys in Europe, but only if it is easy to find, compare and book alongside other modes, and just as easy to manage when plans change. By removing those barriers, Europe can make rail and combined air-rail journeys a much more practical part of business travel, helping companies pursue their sustainability goals without compromising connectivity, traveller experience or productivity”.
Read GBTA’s full position paper here