Renfe crosses the Pyrenees again. More than a year after the end of its collaboration with the SNCF, the Spanish railway company announced yesterday in a press release the deployment of part of its trains on the French network with particularly attractive prices. 9 euros for trips between certain stations in the South (Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Béziers, Montpellier, Narbonne, Nîmes and Perpignan), 19 euros to go to Spain from the South-West and finally 29 euros to get to Barcelona from Lyon or Madrid from Marseille.
No competition with the SNCF yet
Initially scheduled for June, these links will be operational during the month of July after recently obtaining a “security certificate to circulate on the French network” as mentioned by an actor in the file with Le Parisien. Renfe should quickly go from six weekly round trips to two daily connections on each line before the start-up of its AVE high-speed trains on the Paris-Lyon axis.
Note that Renfe is not in direct competition with SNCF on these lines, which the French company abandoned in February 2022 after the breakup of the company with its Spanish counterpart. This rupture had given rise to a distribution of the great connections between the two actors, appropriating the SNCF of Paris-Barcelona while Renfe inherited Lyon-Barcelona and Marseille-Madrid. On the other hand, the SNCF is already a rival of Renfe on the other side of the Pyrenees where it offers Ouigo between Barcelona and the Iberian capital.
Source: BFM TV
