Poland: PKP IC railway operator implements ban on smoking

On December 9th, the ban on smoking will be implemented in PKP Intercity (PKP IC) trains. The total ban will be valid in 30 trains – intercity and eurocity ones. In the remaining 140 trains, i.e. express trains and Tanie Linie Kolejowe, there will be no ban.

“It is our initiative. We want to raise the comfort of traveling for the passengers who pay more for their tickets. The ban is in line with the worldwide trend of limiting smoking in public places and the recent ideas of the Polish Ministry of Health which postulated to implement separate carriages for the smokers”, Czeslaw Warsewicz, the temporary PKP IC CEO said.

The passengers themselves wanted these restrictions. “We conducted a poll on 1,000 clients in July to check how flexibly they would react to a smoking ban in our trains. In case of intercity, only 5 percent of the polled people said they would give up the train”, the temporary CEO added. The smoking ban is just one of the elements of the new strategy providing for, among others, new image of the trains and renewed menu in restaurant carriages.

In the first seven months of this year, PKP IC had PLN 16m (EUR 4m) of net income. In July it noted the highest number of passengers in its history – nearly 1 million. This was 13.7 percent more than in July of 2005, and over 35 percent against 2004. At the end of this year, PKP IC expects to have PLN 40m of net income and 11m of passengers.

(PLN 1 = EUR 0.252)

Source:pulsbiznesu.pl