Illustrative image. (source: SME - Marko Erd)
From March 15, the railway operator ZSSK will introduce a fee when buying train tickets at the ticket office and on trains, with a €1 fee in the case of the former and €3 in the case of the latter, even if a train station does not have a ticket office.
The fee reflects the additional costs incurred such as printing, the maintenance of selling systems, technical support and more. Since buying tickets online does not require these costs, it will see no increase in prices.
However, pensioners of 62 years of age and more, as well as disadvantaged people eligible for travel for free, are exempt from the fee because they may not be able to or know how to buy the ticket online.
The decision was due to the fact that more than 45 percent of ZSSK customers buy their tickets online and the operator wants even more people to adopt the practice. According to ZSSK, recent years saw an increase of people using digital services to get tickets. Over the last five years, the usage of the ZSSK app has increased from 1 percent to more than 17 percent, while more than 28 percent of people use the ZSSK page, a 7 percentage point increase.
On the other hand, the amount of tickets bought at ticket offices is decreasing from almost 70 percent five years ago to almost 48 percent now.
