We thought that the Covid crisis had almost buried business travel. Telecommuting and virtual meetings were seen as the great replacements for physical travel, a trend that ultimately did not continue.
In fact, the SNCF notes the strong recovery of this clientele. Remember that professional travelers are strategic for the operator: they represent 30 to 40% of its turnover.
“It’s a very good surprise,” underlines Jérôme Laffont, TGV/Intercités marketing director. Les chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes: au printemps, 85 to 90% of these clients are returning from trains (against 37% in January) for rapport aux chiffres de 2019 après deux années catastrophiques pendant lesquelles le trafic pro a été divisé by two.
Companies return to “everything virtual”
On the SME side, the manager assures that the levels of 2019 have been found while large account clients are around 80%. Is the bounce cyclical? “The trend is confirmed in September and October,” adds the manager.
Companies are returning from “everything virtual”, says the operator. A study commissioned by the airline shows that physical travel is again considered necessary by 82% of the companies surveyed. Whether to meet with customers or suppliers, or to train employees.
The SNCF took advantage of several factors with, first of all, an aggressive commercial policy. The Freedom card “was the spearhead of this reconquest”, says Jérôme Laffont.
Sold for 399 euros per year, it gives access to flexible tickets at fixed prices. 230,000 of these cards have been sold and the operator is activating the promotional lever to reinforce its appeal. The last operation thus allowed to sell 21,000 in 10 days.
Le Forfait Max a lui aussi trouvé son public: cette offer qui cible notamment les télétravailleurs ayant déménagé que voyagent plusieurs fois par semaine avec un prix fixe selon les destinations (343 euros par mois par exemple pour Paris-Lyon avec deux à trois allers-retours per week). Now he has 14,000 subscribers.
fly ban
But it is above all the ecological awareness of companies that has played in favor of the train. Still according to his study, 70% of the companies questioned plan to choose the train to limit its impact, even for long distances where the plane reigned, such as Frankfurt where the train would have surpassed the air in market share in the last month.
“The acts are correlated with the speeches and we see new uses”, observes the director of marketing. Companies like Orange or Technip forbid their nomadic employees to take the plane if there is an alternative by train in less than 2, 3 or 4 hours. Others such as O2 (personal services) now count the train journey as work time, details the SNCF.
The group intends to capitalize on this trend, in particular through an incentive program. A registered company that achieves the CO2 emission reduction targets thanks to the train thus obtains price reductions of 5 to 10% at the end of the year. “An approach that has been very well received,” announces the group.
28 million tickets sold this summer
If volumes return, SNCF must manage a drop in turnover due precisely to these bonuses and other aggressive pricing policies. A decrease assumed by the operator, the main objective being to double the participation of the train, all customers combined, within a period of 10 years.
Above all because the operator is counting on continued growth in professional traffic in the coming years (with a return to normal from next year) and can also rely on the record numbers of its consumer activity that compensate to a great extent, says, the fall in income from the professional segment. Last summer, SNCF announced that it had sold 28 million tickets, “an absolute record”.
Source: BFM TV
