Flexible tickets and strategic revenue management in high-speed rail market competition

This paper analyses the role of ticket flexibility in revenue management and competitive strategies within high-speed rail (HSR) markets. By considering the relevance of duopolistic settings in the EU markets, we develop a two-firm theoretical model incorporating operator-based and ticket-based competition, which encompasses ticket flexibility options. The model captures key features of liberalized HSR markets where incumbent operators typically offer higher service frequencies while new entrants face capacity constraints and must strategically utilize flexibility policies to compete. Using a Hotelling framework extended to include stochastic ticket availability, we show that the type of competition might critically depend on passengers' disutility due to inflexible tickets and the probability that promotional fares sell out before departure. We calibrate the theoretical model using comprehensive real-time data from the Italian HSR market, tracking ticket fares and availability for Trenitalia and NTV Italo across eight major routes over four months. Besides estimating the probability that entrants exhaust discounted tickets before incumbents through survival analysis of booking patterns, the empirical analysis unveils distinct competition patterns by ticket classes and routes characteristics, as 2nd-class markets and/or long-distance popular routes exhibit ticket-based competition where flexibility implies price premiums, while 1st-class markets and/or short-haul and less demanded city connections display operator-based competition focused on operator characteristics rather than ticket types. Results suggest that, when passengers are weakly sensitive to ticket inflexibility, entrants adopt aggressive pricing across all fares, leading to operator-based competition. By contrast, when flexibility is highly valued, the operators reduce promotional ticket prices while keeping premium pricing for flexible options, resulting in ticket-based competition. These findings have implications for revenue management strategies in HSR markets and suggest that regulatory policies affecting ticket flexibility should be tailored to specific rail sub-markets.