26 June 2023: Last week, ERA attended a workshop organised by the European Commission DG MOVE focussed on the Multimodal Digital Mobility Services (MDMS) initiative. The aim of the workshop was to present the final policy options to the stakeholders, given that some significant adjustments have been made by the Commission to the policy measures since the last workshop in February 2023. The Proposal will be presented in autumn 2023.

Policy Option 1 is a light touch intervention based on voluntary FRAND principles for commercial agreements set by the industry.

Policy Option 2 goes a step beyond PO1 and introduces a number of obligations on re-linking for all MDMS and transport operators:

• B2C MDMS (level 2 services, i.e. metasearch engines) are obliged to enter into commercial agreements based on EC FRAND principles with willing transport operators active within the geographical and modal scope covered by the MDMS to enable the re-linking of tickets.
• All transport operators (long distance and regional) are obliged to enter into agreements based on EC FRAND principles with willing MDMS operators to enable re-linking of tickets.

Policy Option 3 takes a different approach and introduces a number of mandatory re-selling obligations for large MDMS and large transport operators:

• MDMS which are indispensable for transport operators for reaching passengers [50 per cent by volume of transactions undertaken on MDMS and/or at least 50% by volume of re-linking services leading to a transaction] are obliged to enter into commercial agreements based on EC FRAND principles with willing transport operators to enable the re-linking or sell of tickets
• Transport operators which are indispensable for MDMS [50 per cent share of the total domestic air passenger services operated in a Member State in yearly seats/km] and essential for passengers (PSO operators) are obliged to enter into agreements based on EC FRAND principles with willing MDMS to enable re-linking and/or sell of tickets

The provisions of the CRS CoC (in particular, art. 3-6) will be re-introduced and clarified in the MDMS Regulation as common measures across all Policy Options and reinforced with FRAND principles.