Radim Jančura, the owner of the Czech private railway operator RegioJet, has said that train services to Ukraine are more financially profitable for the company than seasonal train services to Croatia.
Jančura said this in an interview with the Czech portal Seznam Zprávy.
"We will not go to Croatia this year. It was the longest line in the EU, and when you add a 20-minute downtown in each country, the overall delay is still long even if you have reserves there... Until last year, these trains were profitable, but last year, for the first time, the economy was not good. We decided to launch these trains on the route from Prague to Ukraine. Within a month, we will launch another service to Zakarpattia via Košice," Jančura said.
Asked whether this would be profitable, unlike Croatia, Jančura said: "Yes, because these are full trains. Especially women with children travel back and forth. But this is mainly a year-round connection. It is one thing to run for two months in the summer and then be in trouble because, in June and September, there is barely a third of the passengers, and the rest of the year we still have to guard the trains so that homeless people do not sleep on them. It is much better to have trains running non-stop and serving those who need them."
As reported earlier, RegioJet launched daily night trains from Prague to Przemyśl with transfers to Ukrzaliznytsia’s trains to Lviv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, and Kyiv (later also to Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Poltava, and Kharkiv) in June 2022.
In February this year, it was announced that RegioJet had signed a contract with Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) to operate trains on the Prague - Košice - Chop route from March. At the end of February, the Czech operator tested a train on the Košice - Chop route.
Also, last year, RegioJet applied to the Polish railway authorities for a license to operate night trains between Przemyśl and Hanover.
