Dynamic pricing increases the price of Nightjet tickets

Note: This blog entry was reposted from night-ride.ch, the predecessor website of nightride.com.  

It's been over two weeks since ÖBB completely reorganised its pricing system for night trains. They now rely on ‘dynamic pricing’, which means that prices are determined by demand and vary over time.

However, it is still not really clear how the system works. There is no transparency. The only thing that has been communicated to the Austrian newspaper Standard and other media is that prices ‘shot up’ briefly due to the large number of requests. The system is now being calibrated and ‘significantly more affordable’ offers can be expected ‘in the next few days’. Two weeks after this announcement, night-ride.ch did a check and realised that this is only partially true.

While prices across all travel categories have eased somewhat, they remain high, especially in sleeper coaches. The markups range from around 15 (2-seater Economy) to 115 per cent (1-seater Deluxe). Only the 3-seater Economy is slightly cheaper at minus 6 per cent (as this is only a sample, I would not describe this as a ‘real change’).

The following chart provides a comprehensive overview. On the one hand, the price range is becoming much broader. The ranges before the price regime change are due to the different routes (for example, there are two routes for the ‘Mini Cabin’ compartment, namely between Hamburg and Vienna and Hamburg and Innsbruck, hence the previous range between 158 and 161 euros).

While prices for sleeper coaches have increased in recent weeks, there has been a reduction in prices for couchettes and seating coaches (including mini cabins), which has become even more significant since the change. For example, 6-seater couchette compartments have become around 30 per cent cheaper on average.

In this evaluation, I have again only looked at the semi-flexible prices of the ‘Sparschiene Komfort’, which already existed before (labelled as ‘normal price’ on night-ride.ch).

But how ‘dynamic’ are the prices actually? In other words, how often do they change? I looked at a few connections for the NJ 490 for the ‘Mini Cabin’ compartment type. For the date, I have chosen the 10th of February 2024:

Here you can see the price change with the timetable change on 10 December. On 12 December and 13 December, there was a price increase for the flexible and semi-flexible ticket categories (flex price and normal price), which was reversed shortly afterwards. The normal price and Sparpreis fell until 17 December, then rose again and has remained at this level ever since.

Things look a little different for the departure on 10 January 2024:

In this case, prices have fallen continuously since the introduction of the new price regime.

These are just two examples and do not show any pattern. Except perhaps for the observation that prices have changed three to five times per day since the introduction of dynamic pricing. Further analyses will give more insight, but more data must be collected first.