Air vs Rail

We hope you like our cartoon (thanks to Rob Murray for the artistry!) which outlines some of the obvious advantages of taking the train over flying.

Let us know if you have any thoughts in the comments.

Since the beginning of time in the travel industry, there has been a need for content aggregators of some description. It has never made any sense for your Mom and Pop travel agent on Main Street (or the High Street depending on where you are reading this) to have relationships with every airline, every hotel chain and every rental car agency in the world in order to fulfill the needs of their customers.

And hence, the original Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) were born.  (This is actually ignoring the fact that originally GDSs were just automated booking systems for individual airlines (such as Sabre and AA) but we'll gloss over that for now.)

The other day, I had a meeting in New York City in the afternoon, so I went down to New York for the day from Boston on Amtrak. This got me thinking that once you include all the bits and pieces of the trip, the train actually stacks up pretty well, as can be seen from the table below.

I was pretty surprised by how close the two were on total time, and air gets blown away on productive time, carbon dioxide produced and even wins on price, once you include all the extra taxis you need to get into the city.

In our heads, we all know that there are some journeys that you fly for, and some that you take the train.  It seems that the world over, similar decisions are being made.  At about 3.5 hours, the majority of people start to prefer the train over flying.  

It's interesting to think, however,  that train journey times are trending down, while flight times are trending up, which reinforces our theory here at SilverRail that trains will continue to take share from air in the regional market.

We recently came across this article in the Scotsman which highlighted that trains were taking share from planes on the London to Scotland routes.

It mentions that the proportion of travelers going from London to Edinburgh by train has increased from 17% in 2006 to 27% last year, with a similar trend for the trip from London to Glasgow (going from 10% to 20% in the same time period).