Originally Posted by
David-A
As for the "be very carefull of what you wish for", let me just say this. Thouse who think it is ALL about revenue not passenger numbers would be very wrong to think that. Plenty of services would simply not be viable without the people on the cheapies. Nor would many benefits afforded to the airline industry in its present form.
OK. Now if AF sells tickets at £1000 ex LON to destination ZZZ via Paris and sells tickets from PAR direct to ZZZ for £2000, do you really think that the ex-LON ticket will remain at £1000 if people in Paris can buy the ticket ex-LON and just skip the first leg? What will happen is that ticket prices will equalise somewhere nearer to the LON price than the PAR price. That in itself will make flight from LON on AF less attractive as you will have lesser of an incentive to go for an indirect flight over a direct flight and will generally favour direct flights and result in the strengthening of flag carriers in their home market as well as increasing fares at the bottom.
Anyway, back to railways, the £12.50 London to York types of fares are not really comparable to the airline situation. They are promotional fares.
I fail to see the difference: they are advance tickets sold on specific services between specific city pairs, exactly the same way as discount Y tickets on airlines.
Personally, for the level of subsidy going in
Well, that's a wholly different debate. The issue is how you structure the revenue streams generated from fares. Whether they are subsidies in it affects the overall level of revenues from fares. It says nothing, however, on how that revenue is structured, whether it is structured by linear fares, proportional to distance (as is practised in a number of other Member States or as was practised by SNCF in France before they moved to a yield management system) or an airline-style system of city-pairs fares. They are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. The advantage of the second system is that it allows deeper discounts on certain routes and probably result in an overall somewhat lower level of fares as it increases the level of occupancy of trains.