Train tickets: “historic record” and winning bet for the SNCF

The alarm rang early for many travelers. Thursday, November 12, from the first hours of sales, more than 100,000 tickets were sold on SNCF Connect in thirty minutes. This is a “historic record”, according to the platform, which predicted nearly a million around noon, or “almost two days of usual sales”. By evening, the counter showed more than 1.8 million tickets, according to a press release from SNCF Connect.

However, the previous record was only six weeks old. On September 30, when sales opened for the holidays, 1.7 million tickets were sold during the day. More than 70,000 Internet users were sometimes connected to the platform at the same time. The next day, during a press conference at the group's headquarters, Jean Castex, the CEO of SNCF, saw this as a sign of the French's “thirst for trains”.

A unique reservation window

This new craze owes a lot to the calendar. Usually, a train ticket is not purchased more than four months before departure. This time, SNCF Voyageurs opened its Inoui TGVs all at once from January 7 to July 2, 2027, enough to organize the winter holidays, the spring holidays and the May holidays in one morning.

The Intercités can be booked until March 31, while the Ouigo has already been bookable until July since the end of September. Desires for elsewhere are not left out. Brussels, Luxembourg and Freiburg im Breisgau are accessible from January, Italy, Spain and Switzerland from April. With so many dates on sale, the record needs to be qualified. More trains to book also means, mechanically, more tickets sold.

Heading for the mountain

Snowboarding lovers have not been forgotten. For the winter, TGV Inoui is selling 570,000 seats to Chambéry, Annecy and the Alpine valleys, i.e. 15,000 more than last season. The weekend of February 13, the big meeting place for crossovers, alone attracts more than 150,000 seats. And for the second year in a row, direct trains run from Paris to Tarentaise every Friday and Sunday.

Getting started early remains the best way to avoid soaring prices. According to SNCF Connect, a ticket booked three to four months in advance is on average up to 45% cheaper than a ticket purchased in the last week. Passengers who find themselves on a full train can still register on a waiting list, which last year allowed one in two customers to get a free place. Enough to make traveling on a whim an increasingly rare luxury.