New proof of the growing appetite of the French for the train, the SNCF Connect reservations site was once again taken by storm this Wednesday morning, for the opening of ticket sales for this summer. At 9 a.m., three hours after the start of sales, 500,000 tickets had already been sold, indicates SNCF Voyageurs to Le Figaro. Compared to the opening of ticket sales last summer, the traffic recorded on SNCF Connect this Wednesday morning is incomparable, with 50% more audience “on the site and the application at the same time” compared to 2023.
And the French got there early, since “the peak of sales was reached from the opening around 6 a.m., with up to 8 TGVs sold per minute on the site and the application”, specifies the railway company . In terms of traffic, the peak was reached a little before 9 a.m., with “up to 400,000 people connected at the same time”. For comparison, for the opening of Christmas 2023 sales last October, a “historic crowd” had already been noted on SNCF Connect, in the words of the SNCF, “with a peak reaching one million connections per minute, well beyond expectations. Or at the peak of connection, “the equivalent of 6 TGVs filled per minute sold on the site and the application”. Exceptional traffic which even caused the SNCF Connect site to crash for several hours.
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Since this Wednesday morning, the French can reserve their long-distance journeys for the summer holidays, since TGV Inoui and Intercités reservations have opened for tickets between July 6 and September 11. For Ouigo, tickets are available until December 14.
To cope with growing demand for trains, SNCF says it will offer 360,000 additional seats on TGV Inoui this summer compared to last summer, including more than 300,000 seats on the Atlantic axis and 60,000 seats on the South-East. . Furthermore, the company has strengthened its offer to and from Paris during the Olympic Games this summer, with 4 million TGV Inoui, Ouigo and Intercités tickets offered over the period of the Olympic Games (July 26-August 11) and Paralympic Games ( August 28-September 8).