European Sleeper experience

[befated]

A newsletter from ES this morning promises Brussels-Malmo in April 2028 and Brussels-Barcelona in 2029. Apologies if these are both old news, I hadn't heard anything was actually progressing on the latter. [Attached image shows updated network map with these, including an Avignon call on the Barcelona route, and Amsterdam/Copenhagen calls on the Malmo route. Note it does not show all intermediate stops on the existing routes, so there might be other stops not shown here when the new services start.]

I also paid a quick visit to the website, which now has a 'Good Fare Finder'. It's just a calendar view of prices for a given journey on different dates, nothing special but much easier than having to run a new search query for every date you want to compare.

 

[danshrimp]

A newsletter from ES this morning promises Brussels-Malmo in April 2028 and Brussels-Barcelona in 2029.

Which is interesting given the press release for the Malmö route, merely a week ago, said that Barcelona was also going to start in 2028. That sure slipped quickly!

Other titbits in the pitch deck for potential investors include the fact that the startup costs for the Paris route were enormous (various factors are hinted at, to be honest a lot of them seem related to how quickly they rushed to start so they could replace the ÖBB service), resulting in a significant loss in 2026 despite much-increased revenue, and the fact that they now don't expect to be profitable until 2030.

Paris bookings were below expectations during the first few months of service, as increasing train capacity took longer than planned. Bookings are now gaining momentum. Operationally, the Paris service also had a challenging start, which temporarily drove up costs.

Performance is now improving, and we expect Paris to follow, or even outperform, the upward curve the Prague route realised. In fact, the Paris - Berlin route is performing relatively better than Brussels - Prague from the start, because of our marketing power, better brand awareness and bigger reach. Which gives promising outlook on the future of these new routes.

Say what you like though, very very few thought they'd make it to this stage. Indeed most people 'in the know' didn't believe they'd ever run a single train. Now they're planning their fourth and fifth routes...