European Train Tickets Get Easier to Book, with NS Joining Later This Year

Booking a cross-border train journey in Europe is becoming a little less of a puzzle. German national rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) has begun integrating the booking systems of other European railways into its own website bahn.de and the DB Navigator app, using a new EU-backed data standard called OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model). The next operator to join is NS, the Dutch national railway, which is expected to be connected later this year.

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What is changing

Tickets from Austria's ÖBB, Switzerland's SBB, France's SNCF, the high-speed operator Eurostar, Italy's Trenitalia and Sweden's SJ are now directly available in DB's digital sales channels. According to DB, that opens up more than 8,000 additional European destinations, ranging from high-speed and night-train connections to regional services and local public transport stops. Travellers can now book journeys such as Rome-Naples, Toulouse-London or even Barcelona-northern Sweden in a single booking.

The key change for passengers is that the booking process for an international trip should now resemble booking a national one: a clear price overview, the option to use discount fares from foreign railways, and the ability to view and manage all tickets, including those from other carriers, in a single DB customer account.

Why "platform" is a slight overstatement

Despite the headlines, this is not a brand new single European booking platform run by the EU, nor a "one ticket for all" system. As rail expert Jon Worth has put it, OSDM is a technical standard that lets operators "stitch together" tickets from each other more easily. It does not, on its own, force railways to sell genuinely unified tickets, nor does it guarantee uniform passenger rights if something goes wrong on a journey involving multiple operators.

A full European Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation, which would impose binding rules on data sharing, ticket re-sale and rights for passengers travelling with several operators, is still being prepared by the European Commission as part of its "Single Ticketing Package." Pro-rail campaigners such as Transport & Environment and Back-on-Track have urged the Commission to deliver an ambitious proposal in 2026.

Demand for international rail keeps climbing

The technical upgrade is happening as cross-border train travel itself is booming. According to DB, nearly a third more passengers chose the train for their European journey in 2025 than in 2019, an increase of more than 25 million people. Between Stuttgart and Paris, ICE and TGV services have now replaced direct flights, with a journey time of under 3.5 hours.

DB now runs more than 300 international connections daily to over 200 cities in 14 countries. The strongest growth in 2025 was on routes such as Munich-Zürich (up 27 percent), Frankfurt-Paris (up 22 percent) and Cologne-Brussels (up 16 percent). The company says it will expand its offer further this summer.

What it means for travellers in the Netherlands

For now, NS International remains the most familiar way for Dutch travellers to book international train trips, mainly to Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Once NS is fully integrated into the OSDM-based system later this year, however, travellers will also be able to book combined journeys including NS connections directly through bahn.de and the DB Navigator app, alongside services from other major European railways.

Real single-click European train travel is still some way off. But for Dutch passengers, the practical difference between booking a domestic and an international train ticket is, step by step, getting smaller.