The cost and difficulty of booking European train tickets is deterring companies from using rail as a greener alternative to air, according to The Co-operative Travel Management.

Paula Cullen, national sales director, said that while companies were conscious about carbon footprints, air was the better option in the current economic climate.

“Of any companies I’ve worked with, very few have large expenditure in rail travel," she said.

"It’s very difficult to get to the bottom of fare structures. Could it be made bigger if it was easier to book and fare structures were made more transparent? Yes."

Cullen said that booking trains to continental Europe was made more difficult by a lack of coordination between British and continental railway companies.

“Operators like SNCF and Deutsche Bahn are very different because they are national organisations and it’s not high on the agenda to work with companies like Eurostar," she added.

“The overall view is that until these organisations work in a more collaborative fashion, it’s going to be difficult."

This week Responsibletravel.com unveiled research which found that train tickets to Barcelona and Munich from the UK were 116% and 96% more expensive than air fares respectively.

It also found that its researchers had a 98% success rate in booking 40 separate return flights to Europe online, whereas only 33% of comparable rail journeys were successfully booked.

Responsible Travel had asked a panel of 10 people to each search for and simulate booking return plane and train tickets on the internet to Barcelona, Rome, Brussels and Munich.

• Eton Travel adds SNCF booking capability (4 Mar 2009)
• Agents call for rail investment — ITM poll (3 Mar 2009)