Germany's Omio Group Agrees to Acquire Rail Europe
Germany's Omio Group has agreed to acquire Rail Europe, the Paris-based rail-ticket distribution platform. With Rail Europe's roughly 5 million tickets a year folded in, the combined Omio Group is projected to sell around 22 million train tickets annually. The transaction is structured as a full acquisition rather than a purchase of a single brand or business unit, and no financial terms have been disclosed.
Rail Europe will keep operating under its own brand as a standalone unit inside Omio, serving its network of more than 25,000 travel-agency partners across 70-plus countries and its direct-to-traveler customers, while adopting Omio's booking technology. The deal still requires a consultation with Rail Europe's French Comite Social et Economique, the works council mandated under French labour law, before it can close; trade-press reports point to an expected close around September 2026. The transaction was first reported by Skift on 16 July 2026 as an exclusive, ahead of wider trade-press coverage the following day.
The sellers are private equity firm Hivest Capital Partners and Bpifrance, which -- together with Rail Europe's management team -- acquired the company from SNCF Voyageurs and SBB on 9 March 2022, taking it from railway-operator ownership to independent private-equity ownership. Rail Europe is not currently SNCF-owned. The company traces its rail-distribution roots back more than 90 years, a history longer than its recent corporate ownership changes suggest, though the exact chain of brand transitions could not be independently confirmed. Omio was founded in Berlin in 2013 as GoEuro and rebranded Omio in 2019; its multimodal booking platform covers rail, air, bus and ferry travel and already includes the Omio B2B unit and trip-planning site Rome2rio. The deal keeps the two brands separate at the point of sale rather than merging them into a single storefront.
"This deal marks a transformative moment for the future of global ground transport," said Jean-Francois Bessiron, Chief B2B Officer of Omio Group. Bjorn Bender, CEO and Executive Chairman of Rail Europe, called the tie-up a "natural fit," pointing to Omio's scale and technology alongside Rail Europe's rail expertise, brand recognition and B2B distribution network. Neither company has announced an antitrust or merger-control filing; the CSE consultation is the only regulatory step named in public statements so far.