Thalys and Eurostar will therefore become one. This Friday, April 29, the SNCF announced the creation of a Eurostar Group holding company, based in Brussels and of which Jacques Damas, current director of the cross-Channel railway company, will be in charge.
The operation, called “Green Speed” internally, had been announced in 2019 but put on hold during the health crisis. Concretely, thehe two international TGV entities majority controlled by SNCF will continue to exist legally, but under the new holding company, majority owned by SNCF Voyageurs (55.75%) alongside Caisse de depot du Québec (19.3%), Belgian railways (18.5%) and investment funds managed by Federated Hermes Infrastructure (6.44%).
Single Eurostar brand
The idea is first to be more visible to customers: within two or three years, the entire TGV fleet should be operating in five European countries under the single Eurostar brand. “It will take two or three years to see the effects of this merger, explained last year Alain Krakovitch, CEO of Voyages SNCF, during a trip to Brussels to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Franco-Belgian rail link. This project will make it possible to form a railway diamond between London-Paris-Frankfurt-Amsterdam, with Brussels as the center of gravity,” he specified. London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.).
Eventually, the yellow and blue Eurostar brand will prevail over that of Thalys, considered the most emblematic, in particular to win over customers outside Europe. The merger will take time, however, because SNCF needs to overhaul distribution tools, to offer end-to-end journeys with a single ticket, a common loyalty program and smoother connections, particularly via Brussels.
Optimizing the use of the 51 TGVs
In addition to the cost synergies in distribution, IT and on-board service, the merger should make it possible to improve the train utilization rate. Because it is not a question of ordering new trains, but of optimizing the rotation of the current fleet (25 Eurostar trains from Siemens and 26 Thalys from Alstom). Knowing that for safety reasons, TGV Thalys are not approved to use the Channel Tunnel.
The merger should also simplify ticketing and create a loyalty program for users. Because thehe SNCF has in mind to better target business class customers. Presented as the birth of a “new European high-speed player”, the Green Speed project is in competition with low-cost airlines, such as Ryanair or Easyjet, and is counting on the incentives of business executives to take the train rather than flying for environmental reasons.
30 million passengers per year in 2032
Green Speed is thus targeting 30 million passengers transported per year within ten years (compared to 18 million in 2019). L’objective may seem ambitious when the two companies, especially Eurostar, have been hard hit by the Covid crisis. Saved last year from bankruptcy by its shareholders, Eurostar (debted to the tune of 480 million euros) transported 1.6 million passengers in 2021, compared to 2.5 million in 2020 and 11.1 million in 2019. The current year looks set to be better, however, with an increase in attendance, estimated at nearly 90% this summer compared to 2019, according to management. The company has also restored its London-Marne-la-Vallée link for customers of the Disneyland Paris park. For its part, Thalys, with its TGVs between France, Belgium, the Netherlands and north-west Germany, transported 2.7 million passengers in 2021 compared to 2.5 million in 2020 (+8 %) and 7.8 million in 2019 (-66%).
However, the new group risks having to face new competitors on its lines. In the fall, the Spanish public railway company, Renfe, indicated that it was considering the link to England. But without giving more details. In mid-March, Jacques Gounon, president of Getlink, the operator of the Channel Tunnel, announced that he wanted to encourage the arrival of new entrants by buying ten high-speed trains and then renting them to interested companies. According to the group’s calculations, two to three million more passengers could make the trip under the Channel.
