Train: Easy Paris

Today, it is perfectly feasible for a businessman working in Strasbourg, Rennes, Lille or even Marseille to make a return trip to the capital for a simple lunch. Year after year, high-speed rail has succeeded in transforming the "French desert" into Paris's "outer ring road". The history of the Paris-Marseille link is a good illustration of this revolution. At the beginning of the 19th century, it took stagecoaches 70 hours of bumpy travel to link the two cities. The arrival of the Express 3 in 1859 cut the journey to just under 19 hours. Before the Grande Vitesse, it still took the legendary Mistral 6 hours and 40 minutes to link the Canebière to the Seine. Today, Marseille is just three hours from Paris.

The train is gaining ground

Guillotined journey times, then, but also city-centre to city-centre links and simpler procedures: it's hardly surprising to see the train gaining ground every year against the plane on the main national routes to Paris. In terms of market share, rail already accounts for 63 % from Perpignan, 69 % from Montpellier and 73 % from Marseille. Even so, air travel manages to keep control of a few niche markets, with rail currently accounting for only 18 % on the Paris-Toulouse route and 35 % on Paris-Nice. But these dominant positions are by no means rents.

For proof of this, we need only look at the schedule drawn up by Réseaux ferrés de France for the development of high-speed rail. In 2015, Paris will be just 1 hour 25 minutes from Rennes. The following year, it will be just 1 hour 50 minutes from Strasbourg. By 2020, travellers from Toulouse will have saved almost two hours and twenty minutes on their rail journey to Paris, which they will be able to reach in three hours. By 2023, Paris will be less than four hours from Nice. By then, the network of high-speed lines will have more than doubled in size throughout metropolitan France.

But the deployment of high-speed rail does not in itself sum up the change in the routine of business travellers in Paris. Thanks to the TGV, the provinces are no longer what they were, but neither is Paris. Particularly its stations. Just take a diversion into the 'main line' area of the Gare du Nord to see for yourself. The "busiest station in Europe" is nothing like the frightening terminus, the supposed den of Parisian turpitude that it was before the arrival of the TGV in 1993. The presence of Eurostar and Thalys around the light-flooded platforms has encouraged the development of lounges and a retail park much better suited to the needs of frequent travellers. The symbol of a more general transformation.

Concierge services at stations

Long seen as a deterrent, stations are once again becoming attractive locations for business service providers. Take Multiburo, for example, which set up France's first "station business centre" at Gare de Lyon in 2004. Or its competitor Regus, which has set up in Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare and has made finding sites at Gare de Lyon and Gare du Nord one of its priorities for 2010. The SNCF is doing its utmost to support the return to favour of the rail option among French business travellers. The national company has launched a specific service policy which, since 1999, has included the development of the Grand Voyageur offer and ad hoc lounges at Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon and Paris-Montparnasse.

Since the end of 2007, this service has been complemented by the TGV Pro offer and the "Services counters" in the lounges, where frequent travellers can book a taxi, request a courier or find emergency clothing or IT equipment. A true concierge service that confirms the obvious: Paris stations have once again become very pleasant places to visit.