Renfe is already attracting French guests: 31,000 tickets have been sold in two weeks

Attraction of novelty, curiosity of educate passengers, or (destiny) real essential motion? The arrival on the tricolor rails of Renfe, the equal of the SNCF on the other facet of the Pyrenees, seduces customers. The Spanish employer has already offered 31,000 tickets for its AVE trains in France due to the fact June 21, while reservations opened.

Renfe exact, this Thursday, July 6 in Lyon (Lyon), the blessings of its AVE train provide, with which it'll begin to serve France next week. It will begin operating next Thursday on the Barcelona-Lyon line, then will open a Madrid-Marseille line from July 28.

In six days, it'll for this reason placed the AVE S-one hundred trains into service, a “model that reaches 300 km/h, with 347 seats in popular and comfort magnificence motors, wifi connection and on-board entertainment device, Coffee Car and an indoors feature of Spanish excessive-speed trains, with a high level of consolation on board,” explains the company.

Seats at 29 euros… or even nine euros on sections

Renfe has released a promotional charge campaign to place itself on the French market. Tickets to journey on the entire route, the Lyon-Barcelona Marseille-Madrid connections, are 29 euros. Unlike Trenitalia, in view that its launch in December 2021 on Paris-Lyon, Renfe will not ought to face opposition from SNCF on those  routes. The French organization abandoned these correspondences, in February, after the rupture of its partnership with, exactly, Renfe.

 

In addition, a salvo of tickets at 9 euros will permit tourists to discover the Spanish high-speed teach on a section, with departure or stop in Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Avignon, Béziers, Aix-en-Provence or Narbonne. The  traces will join a complete of 17 destinations on each facets of the border.

Final objective, to compete with the SNCF at the Paris-Lyon

The Lyon-Barcelona line, the most requested, can be operated from Friday to Monday and will have a each day frequency from September 1. The equal is going for the Madrid-Marseille line, a good way to have a each day frequency from October 1.

 

Ultimately, the Spanish railway business enterprise intends to be aggressive on the main French axis, Paris-Lyon, with extensions to Barcelona and Marseille. For the Spanish institution attacked on its market by Ouigo, the low-fee subsidiary of the SNCF, it's miles a query of replicating, by positioning itself as a “reference operator” at the French rail.