In aviation, travel agencies only receive commissions from very few airlines for the sale of flight tickets. Now Deutsche Bahn AG also wants to follow suit and no longer wants to pay for the brokerage of tickets. Naturally, this is met with criticism.

In the meantime, it has become common practice for travel agencies to charge service fees for booking flight tickets. The reason for this is that Lufthansa, for example, has not paid any commissions for a long time and the agencies would otherwise have no income at all. The amount of the reservation fee varies depending on the travel agency. From around five euros to 100 euros, pretty much everything is included.

Deutsche Bahn AG pays those agencies with which it has brokerage contracts up to six percent of the ticket price as remuneration. That should change now, because in the future there should be no commission at all. First of all, ICE tickets should be affected. Travel agencies with a DB license should no longer receive anything from January 2023. The German Travel Association considers this to be “a strategically completely wrong decision”, also with a view to climate protection. They demand that politicians intervene and stop the project.

With this measure, DB wants to strengthen direct sales, especially via the Internet and the app. At many smaller train stations, however, there are travel agencies that have taken over the sale of tickets there due to the long-abolished passenger ticket offices. With zero commission and possible agency service fees, it can be expected that many travel agencies will stop selling train tickets. This is considered personnel-intensive because not only lucrative long-distance tickets are sold, but most of the rush wants short-distance tickets, from which the agencies earn little.