With the continuation of the Travelski Night Express Paris–Tarentaise service and the launch, next winter, of a direct service from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Brussels, the Compagnie des Alpes is no longer content merely to encourage its customers to travel by train. It is purchasing rail services, assuming the commercial risk, and seeking to transform the journey into an integral part of the skiing holiday. Behind the night train, therefore, lies a much broader question for the mountain tourism industry: how far up the value chain must a ski resort operator go to control the customer experience and reduce the carbon footprint of their stay? Dominique Thillaud, Managing Director of Compagnie des Alpes, outlines the initial results of this strategy for I Love Ski.1>
This winter, travellers will be able to fall asleep in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp or Brussels and wake up in the Tarentaise. From mid-December, Travelski, a subsidiary of the Compagnie des Alpes (CDA), will be adding a new weekly night service to its existing Paris–Moûtiers–Aime-la-Plagne–Bourg-Saint-Maurice route, linking the Netherlands and Belgium with the French Alps. Both trains will now be powered by electricity.
Presented in this way, the news might simply appear to be about a new railway line. Yet it tells a different story. Having long focused their efforts on what happens once customers arrive at the station, mountain transport operators are beginning to take a much more direct interest in what happens beforehand. And the Compagnie des Alpes is now taking this approach particularly far: it is not content merely to promote the train or to negotiate a few seat quotas with an operator. It purchases a complete rail service, markets it, fills it to capacity and agrees to bear part of the financial risk.
I Love Ski had already been following the various stages of this rail strategy, from the Travelski Express linking London to the Alps to the launch of the Travelski Night Express between Paris and Bourg-Saint-Maurice in 2025 and, more recently, the announcement of its extension to the Benelux countries. Looking back on the first season, what is now becoming apparent is not so much a series of experiments as a strategy that is beginning to take shape.
The night train: a new feature of the ski package
One of the most interesting aspects of Dominique Thillaud’s speech is precisely that he says very little about the train as a mere means of transport:
“The mode of transport changes the product and the customer experience”
The reasoning is simple. A week-long holiday that begins with a train journey on Friday evening and ends with the return journey on the following Saturday evening allows you to spend eight days in the mountains whilst using only five days’ holiday leave. This means you can gain two extra days’ skiing compared with some traditional holiday arrangements. And these extra days fall in particular on Saturdays, a special day in major holiday resorts, marked by the comings and goings of holidaymakers.
This detail makes a big difference. The night train is no longer marketed solely on the basis of its carbon footprint, but on its ability to enhance the enjoyment of holidays.
The first season of the Paris–Tarentaise service provided an opportunity to test the concept. Dominique Thillaud cites a punctuality rate of ‘between 95 and 99 per cent’, with, according to him, only one train that was genuinely late. “The first thing we expect from a train is punctuality. So in that respect, the objective has been achieved”, he sums up.
For the February 2026 school holidays, it also announced occupancy rates of 85 to 87 per cent. La Compagnie des Alpes has since officially confirmed a rate of 85 per cent in the middle of winter, stating that the service had demonstrated both its technical reliability and its commercial viability.
Nevertheless, there is still much room for improvement. Bedding, mattress toppers, duvets, menus and catering: the first season was treated as a learning curve. The next season must mark a step up in quality, with mattress toppers, a made-up bed service and a first-class sleeper carriage. CDA is retaining the all-female compartments and the option for four passengers to book an entire six-berth compartment so they can travel as a family.
The line between transport and hospitality is therefore becoming increasingly blurred.
A rail start-up behind a multi-million project
Another interesting aspect of the project lies in its organisation. As there is a shortage of sleeper carriages readily available in Europe, the CDA is working with Pegasus Trains, a young French company specialising in the development of seasonal tourist trains. “When there are no more sleeper carriages in Europe, if you really look for them, you’ll find them,” smiles Dominique Thillaud. Some carriages were therefore sourced from Germany before being completely refurbished.
Pegasus rents out the carriages, funds their refurbishment and provides the Compagnie des Alpes with a fully operational train and its crew. The CDA then purchases the services and takes charge of booking, marketing and developing the tourist package centred around the journey.
The ticket can be purchased on its own, but its strategic value lies primarily in the package deal: train travel, the final leg of the journey from Bourg-Saint-Maurice to the resort, accommodation and other services. It is here that the rail sector ties in directly with the group’s distribution strategy.
This move is by no means an isolated one. Through Travelski, as well as the development of its Distribution & Hospitality division and the acquisition of MMV, the CDA has been seeking for several years to play a greater role in the customer journey. I Love Ski had already analysed this trend at the time of the Compagnie des Alpes’ acquisition of MMV, specifically highlighting greater control over the value chain. The railway now adds another building block: access to the destination.
And this service comes at a high price. Dominique Thillaud refers to “several million euros” spent on procuring this rail service. “We’re not buying infrastructure; we’re buying a service”, he explains.
Being prepared to lose money in an attempt to create a market
This is probably the most telling point in this review. The first season in Paris was not profitable. “We lost a little money this year; it was the launch year. It’s a product that needs time to establish itself. It takes two or three years, and after three years we’ll take stock: has the product found its audience or not?”
This statement is important because it highlights a reality that is often overlooked when discussing the transition: some solutions may seem obvious on paper, but before a viable business model can be established, they require several years of investment, adjustments and, at times, losses.
A seasonal night train cannot simply be set up just because there is potential demand. You have to source the rolling stock, refurbish it, secure the train paths, organise the operation, market several hundred seats each week and accept that it will take time for a new product to find its audience.
This is precisely where the size of the Compagnie des Alpes comes into its own. Thanks to its financial strength and its influence within the tourism sector, the group can commit significant resources to projects where a return is neither immediate nor guaranteed. Dominique Thillaud puts it bluntly: “Apart from us, no one else is financially strong enough to take this risk, telling themselves: I’m going to lose money for a year, perhaps two, before breaking even.”
However, this does not mean turning the rail sector into a new source of high-margin profit. The aim is, first and foremost, to achieve economic equilibrium whilst continuing to develop the product offered to customers. “The aim is not to make a fortune”, points out Dominique Thillaud.
This capacity for investment also gives major operators a particular responsibility when it comes to experimentation. They can fund the initial stages of solutions that are still costly or imperfect, whereas an independent operator, a small station or a company in a more precarious financial position might not necessarily be able to sustain several years of development.
Dominique Thillaud himself draws a parallel with the electric snow groomer and the 5 million euros of research and development required to develop it. In his view, this kind of innovation requires substantial financial resources and the ability to invest over several years before the full results can be assessed.
The benefits therefore extend beyond the Compagnie des Alpes alone. When an organisation of this size agrees to fund the initial development of a technology or a new mobility model, it also helps to test its feasibility on a real-world scale. If the approach proves successful, these trials can then help to facilitate its roll-out to other organisations in mountain regions.
€200 from Paris, around €300 from Amsterdam
Of course, there remains the question of price and scale. Dominique Thillaud mentions a price of around 200 euros return for Paris > Tarentaise and a range of around 300 to 320 euros return from Amsterdam.
In terms of capacity, official figures released by the Compagnie des Alpes indicate that, for the winter of 2026–2027, there will be 660 berths on services departing from Paris and more than 400 berths on services departing from Amsterdam. Both routes are to be operated using electric traction and will benefit from an upgrade in on-board service, notably with new menus and plans for a first-class sleeper carriage.
The 2026–2027 season also marks a significant expansion in the timetable: 15 return journeys are scheduled between mid-December and the end of March, with departures on Friday evenings and returns on Saturday evenings. During the first season of the Paris–Bourg-Saint-Maurice service, in 2025–2026, the Travelski Night Express operated 14 return journeys, with a train comprising 660 couchettes and a bar-restaurant carriage.
Given the millions of holiday stays in the Alps each year, a few hundred travellers a week obviously do not, on their own, significantly disrupt the flow of visitors to the resorts. But this is probably not the right way to assess this first stage. The real challenge lies in the replicability of the model.
After Paris, the Benelux countries are next. For the winter of 2026–2027, the new route is set to link Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Brussels to Moûtiers, Aime-la-Plagne and Bourg-Saint-Maurice. La Compagnie des Alpes itself refers to a ‘vertical Europe’, a sign that its ambition goes beyond simply opening a single new route.
And after the Benelux countries, London clearly remains top of mind. La Compagnie des Alpes had already trialled a route between London and the Alps with Travelski during the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 seasons. Dominique Thillaud leaves little doubt as to his interest in reviving it: “If tomorrow we had the opportunity to repeat the experiment we carried out in London in 2021, we would do so immediately.” For the time being, he adds, this operational possibility does not exist.
The real ‘carbon wall’ is just before the station
This development comes at a time when ski resorts have already significantly reduced some of the emissions directly linked to their operations. According to the latest official figures available for the 2024–2025 financial year, the CDA’s Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 73 per cent compared with 2018–2019 within the scope of its carbon trajectory. For the ski resorts, the group now reports 190 grams of CO₂ per skier-day, a figure that remains stable compared with the previous financial year.
Dominique Thillaud puts this trend into historical context: “We’re now at 190 grams per skier-day. Five years ago, it was 1,400 grams. We’ve reduced it by a factor of almost ten.”
But the more emissions linked to the resort’s operations are reduced, the more apparent it becomes what lies outside its ski lifts: Scope 3 emissions, and in particular the customer’s journey. A study carried out with Carbone 4 on 150,000 European skiers, previously presented by Travelski and reported by I Love Ski, estimated that the journey from home to the resort accounted for an average of around 80 per cent of the holiday’s overall carbon footprint.
This is precisely where the paradigm shift lies. A ski resort can convert its snow groomers, improve the energy efficiency of its ski lifts and decarbonise its buildings. But it has no direct control over the cars in which several thousand customers arrive every Saturday. The train therefore represents an attempt to shift the operator’s sphere of influence beyond the ski area.
‘No public money’
One final feature of the model: according to Dominique Thillaud, the trains rely on no public subsidies. Local authorities and tourist boards are, of course, free to organise a welcome at the station, publicise the service or promote rail travel in their international markets. But “this project is entirely funded by the Compagnie des Alpes, without recourse to public subsidies”, he states.
This does not mean that the local areas remain outside the scheme. Bourg-Saint-Maurice and the resorts it serves have every reason to capitalise on the arrival of these new visitor numbers. However, the CDA is adopting an entrepreneurial approach here: it considers that access is now a sufficiently strategic component of its business to justify taking on the risk itself.
This question could become a key issue for mountain regions in the coming years: who should fund the transformation of tourist transport? Railway operators? Public authorities? Regions? Destinations? Operators? Or a combination of all these stakeholders? The Compagnie des Alpes is currently testing one possible solution.
How far does the ski area now extend?
This is perhaps, ultimately, the most interesting question raised by the Travelski Night Express. For decades, a ski resort operator’s role could be summarised quite simply: transporting skiers up a mountain, running ski lifts, maintaining the slopes and ensuring the safety of the ski area. Today, the scope of this role is much less clear-cut.
Compagnie des Alpes is investing in accommodation, distribution, the digital experience, transport within resorts and, now, in rail links that bring customers from their home markets. This development does not mean that all ski resort operators will become train operators overnight. It does, however, show that a resort’s success is no longer determined solely by what happens on the slopes.
Access is becoming a climate, commercial and experiential issue all at once. The CDA’s challenge, therefore, lies less in demonstrating that skiers like the train (occupancy rates exceeding 85 per cent during the busiest weeks already provide part of the answer) than in proving that a seasonal night train can break even and be replicated across several European regions.
Dominique Thillaud has given himself three years to find out.
