Yield management practices make a lot of sense: costumers are not equal, and their ability, willingness and sensibilitiy to pay different prices for exactly the same coach seat from point A to point B can be properly explored.
The more classical comparison is that a college student can buy his tickets with months in advance, but not pay a high fare, while executives and managers – even when not travelling business or first class – cannot plan trips within more than a couple days, and are more prone to buy the ticket even at n-fold times the student’s one fare. On the other side, advance purchases make aircraft and crew allocation far easier than sit-and-wait until the last minute when hurried business travellers show up.
I’m amused by how passenger railway operators, especially high-speed ones, took so long to catch up with using these YM schemes on their services (the concept for commuter metropolitan rail will not apply as it). Fortunately, is a scenario that is changing fast.
Despite rolling stock, crowdness and realiability problems, British train operators are the most advanced in the art of yield management, extracting more money from those last-minute travellers who have small price-demand elasticity (they will pay very high fares because they need to reach their destinations in a hurry no matter what) and offering sweet deals for those who buy return-tickets some weeks in advance.
Then, Eurostar followed suit and start offering at least 5 different fare classes and ajdusting their availability to weekdays and more busy periods (of course they can charge more, in average, for early Monday or late Friday departures).
Trenilatia is slowly getting a grip with it, now requiring reservation in most non-regional trains, high-speed or not. With compulsory reservation came mandatory change and modification fees, though rules are still too lax and do not vary as much as they should acconding to fare paid. Even more interesting, they offer far more discount tickets in the Milano-Roma (through Bologna) journeys (which has a busy air shuttle competition) than in Bologna-Roma.
After decades of comforatable monopolies and XIX policies allowing tickets to be bought onboard (absurd), or ticket-holders to hop on any train, passenger rail companies are modernizing themselves.
With high-speed services liberalization, sooner or later low-cost rail operators (like iTGV) will pop up, offering competitive prices in major high-speed routes, concerned with providing cheap, fast and efficient transport between major demand points, and not carrying the burn of being part of an "integrated national network".
However, some issues remain unaddressed, and I hope rail companies tacke them soon:
– tickets are still unnammed, which combined with incresed fare discrimination has already started a (still) small market for scalpers or, for instance, bulk advance purchase by hostel groups in some major cities (it happens in Amsterdam and Londond AFAIK) to "resell" them to backpackers. Every high-speed and long-distance ticket should be named and not transferable.
– anacronic rail passes have not yet been pashed out. Once popular, Eurail, InterRail and such offers have no place in modern day, yield managed high-speed and long distance rail travel. For sure, ever increasing supplements and surchages are taking away the lure of this antiquaded products, but internationl rail passes programs should be scraped altogether.
– lack of platform and train access control makes it easier for passengers to play the system and manage to get combined services with regional or suburban journeys to avoid increased possibilities of charging more passengers arriving or departuring from stations where there is less competition with either other rail carriers or airlines. Target pricing would be far more interesting if long-distance services operated in "sealed" platforms, for instancing, not allowing someone with and Amsterdam to Paris ticket to board an Amsterdam-Bruxelles-Paris train in Brussels if by any commercial reason tickets from Amsterdam to Paris were cheper than ticketes from Brussels.
What do you fellow forummites think about rail travel pricing, particularly non-commuter, non-suburban/regional travel?