March 12th, 2013 – ebookers.com adds rail product to their site, becoming the first European Online Travel Agent (OTA) to sell rail tickets alongside flights, hotels and car hire, in partnership with SilverRail Technologies.

Previously, consumers looking to book a trip on an Online Travel Agency weren’t able to include train travel, but would need to visit a separate rail-only booking website.  Now, ebookers.com is able to offer customers a one-stop-shop for planning and purchasing all of their travel.

Despite the increasing popularity of rail, the process for planning and booking train travel has remained more complex and difficult than booking flights. “With the increasing popularity of rail travel in the UK, we believe it is essential for us to offer train tickets on our site,” said President of ebookers.com, Tamer Tamar. “We pride ourselves on becoming the first OTA to offer UK rail to customers, thus providing them with the best choice of products to meet all of their travel needs.  Further down the track we plan to make rail available in other countries we serve and add the option to package rail with other travel products, such as hotels.”

With more and more people choosing to travel by rail in Britain there is an increasing need for train tickets to be easily purchased alongside other travel options. Rail travel within Britain is currently at its highest usage level since the 1920s, with over 1.4 billion journeys made in the 12 month period covering 2011/12. According to the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), this is a 37% rise since 2000.

“We are committed to making purchasing rail travel as simple as possible. This partnership with ebookers.com is significant because it is a large step towards achieving our goal of making rail just as easy to book as flights,” said SilverRail CEO, Aaron Gowell. “Our partnership with ebookers.com is the first of its kind and we think other OTAs will soon realise the value of including rail within their product portfolios. We hope to see more partnerships like this one covering more countries and further expanding the consumers' access to rail travel.”