Last year, a total of 6.1 million journeys were made on Elron’s trains
The number of train passengers increased by almost 100,000 in 2021 when compared to figures for the year before: 6.1 million journeys were made in the year, with services being used most intensively at the beginning of the summer, in June.
According to Ronnie Kongo, Elron’s sales and development manager, the year was again full of challenges: ‘We are continuously striving to increase the popularity of train travel, but the ongoing pandemic and extensive railway construction work has significantly disturbed rail traffic. The year ended positively, however, with the number of customers increasing by a figure of 20% in December’.
Last year Elron’s trains were most often used along three major routes, the Tallinn-Paldiski route (covering a total of 1,088,000 trips), the Tallinn-Riisipere-Turba route (involving 1,087,000 trips), and Tallinn-Tartu (covering 869,000 trips). Compared to the year before, the highest number of additional journeys were added on the Turba route (up by 75,000), the Tartu route (up by 45,000), and the Kloogaranna route (up by 42,000). Ronni Kongo is happy to see that Estonian people have again started to use trains more often for their longer journeys. ‘The number of longer trips increased by 11% last year, with the number of customers increasing by as much as a fifth on some routes. This trend clearly demonstrates the need for new trains in order to increase customer satisfaction levels, and also to increase the frequency of trips along all routes across Estonia. The trains which are to be purchased are electric, which means that they will be the most environmentally-friendly means of transport in Estonia. Since the beginning of last year all of Estonia’s current stock of electric trains have also been running on green energy’.
In total, 6,066,681 journeys - or 16,700 trips a day - were made on Elron’s total number of routes.
A total of 65% of customers used self-service for buying their tickets. Tickets were either purchased online or from a ticket vending machine. As of December, contactless payments can now be used when purchasing a train ticket from a ticket vending machine. This opportunity has already been used on more than 25,000 occasions. More and more customers have used the opportunity to create an account on Elron’s website where they can save details of their bank cards. This makes paying online for a ticket even more convenient as the payment can be made with just one click of the mouse. Using self-service options for buying tickets is also cheaper when compared to purchasing a ticket from a customer attendant: a discount of 15% is available online and a discount of 10% is available when using a ticket vending machine. Thanks to this, and based on a customer satisfaction survey which was conducted at the end of 2021, a total of 89% of Elron’s customers believe that the process of buying tickets is easy. Customers are also satisfied with the levels of safety of the trains themselves (91%), with Elron’s customer attendants (89%), and with the cleanliness of the trains (85%). Figures for timetable accuracy also remained at a high level last year, with 98% of all services being on time.
Elron’s income from ticket sales amounted to 14.2 million euros last year, increasing by 4% on the previous year.
