This Wednesday, March 2, SNCF Voyageurs opens sales of its new offer: Ouigo classic train. With a very low introductory price: 5 euros per ticket this Wednesday and Thursday, for the first 300,000 tickets sold.
The first trains will run from April 11. These old renovated coral trains will serve, at a fixed daily time, 14 stations on two lines: Nantes-Paris-Nantes and Lyon-Paris-Lyon. If these trains share the pink and turquoise color code (but reversed) and the name Ouigo with their high-speed cousin, it is to remind them of their low-cost positioning. But in Ouigo classic train, travelers should not be in a hurry. To reach Lyon (Rhône) from Paris, the journey will take between 4h45 and 5h15. For Paris-Nantes, served by Blois (Loir-et-Cher) or by Le Mans (Sarthe), it will take between 3h30 and 4h15.
Eight renovated carriages per train will be able to transport 640 passengers at up to 160 km/h in a single second class, without plugs or wi-fi, but with spaces for bicycles and the possibility of snacking.
After the promotion, places between 10 and 30 euros
Once past the launch promotion at 5 euros, Ouigo classic train tickets will be sold between 10 and 30 euros. “We wanted a very low fixed price to be aligned with carpooling prices while being faster, explains Alain Krakovitch, director of SNCF TGV and Intercités (formerly Voyages SNCF). The price will vary according to the timetable and the route but it will be fixed on the train. Clearly, all travelers seated in the comfortable benches of the Corail train will have paid the same price. The fare will not soar when we approach the last places available or the date of departure according to the logic of “yield management” applied to all TGVs.
To obtain these low prices, while aiming for profitability, the SNCF uses low-cost recipes in general, and Ouigo in particular: “The optimization of the rotation of equipment, a limited fleet and limited maintenance, which make it possible to lower costs by around 30%”, detailed in September Cécile Boucaut, the director of Oslo, the SNCF Voyageurs subsidiary specially created for these Ouigo lines at conventional speed.
Reach 1.2 million travelers within two years
The new subsidiary pushes the social slider even further by asking the three “versatile” agents on board the train to take over certain tasks, previously carried out by agents on the ground. If the SNCF has not lacked volunteers, in particular from Transilien, to fill the 80 positions necessary for the Ouigo classic train, the unions have denounced these two-speed labor rights.
In June, the frequency will increase from two daily round trips on the Paris-Nantes line and one daily round trip on the Paris-Lyon line to respectively five and two rotations per day. Stuck between faster TGVs and TERs that serve more stations, will these new low-cost trains find their audience, even though the German Flixbus threw in the towel on a similar project in April 2020? Oslo’s stated objective is to reach 1.2 million travelers per year within two years.