Ouigo, a subsidiary of France’s SNCF, has announced a new low-cost train route between Madrid and Alicante to be launched this autumn.
The service, without a specific start date confirmed yet, will be offering two daily services in each direction, including a stop in the Castilla-La Mancha city of Albacete. One-way ticket prices will start at €9 for the journey that will take approximately two and a half hours.
Ouigo trains – that have two floors and can seat 509 passengers – began operating in Spain in 2021 ‘with the aim of popularising high-speed travel and making this means of transport affordable to everybody’. They currently have another two-and-a-half hour service between Madrid and Barcelona that also stops in Zaragoza and Tarragona.
The French rail company is also planning to launch a Madrid-Valencia route this Spring, with several daily services in each direction. On their website, they state that they will ‘continue expanding our destinations until we reach 30 daily departures to Valencia, Alicante, Cordoba, Seville and Malaga’. Ouigo has been successful in Spain since its launch in May 2021, with 1.4 million passengers so far.
Avlo, the new low-cost subsidiary of Spain’s public train network, Renfe, and a direct competitor of Ouigo, has already announced that it will be launching a new high-speed train route between Madrid and Valencia on 21 February 2022, with tickets going for as little as €7. It was initially announced to launch in time for Las Fallas in Valencia in March 2022.
Most tickets on both Avlo and Ouigo are not available for the minimum price, and yet are still much cheaper than tickets for the AVE high-speed services of Renfe – until recently the only official rail company in Spain.
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