Giovanna Dunmall examines an innovative scheme to make rail travel more attractive

In the early 1990s Rome’s Termini Station aroused at best a lack of enthusiasm, and at worst feelings of trepidation. The possibilities for refreshment were limited and the few shops sold an uninspiring array of products. Despite being a major hub for the metro and buses, the area was also run-down and plagued by pickpockets and vagrants. The imposing 1950s architecture, including its famous undulating roof, had become dilapidated, and most importantly, a place Romans felt rather ashamed of.

An Ambitious Scheme
Fast forward to June 1998. Enter Grandi Stazioni, a company created two years earlier by the state Railway Network (FS), to refurbish Roma Termini for the 2000 Jubilee when it would become, as the press material states portentously, ‘an Italian portal to the world’. Sounds ambitious? Absolutely. But it also made perfect commercial, logistic, and even sociological sense. Termini, like most stations, boasts an enviable central location, a vast amount of space (at 225,000 square metres the largest in Europe), and a huge, captive audience (over 400,000 users daily). But that’s where similarities with other stations end.

In its glitzy post-Jubilee incarnation, Termini offers an almost unheard of selection of services: a shopping centre open from 8am to 10pm, with over 100 shops including a department store, a bookstore, two supermarkets, an art gallery and museum, a gym, 22 restaurants, bars and cafés, a post-office, ticket agencies, travel agents, a church and a medical centre. It even has a Centro Benessere (Wellbeing Center), offering natural and herbal remedies, and alternative treatments such as shiatsu and aromatherapy. Concerts and major art exhibitions are held in the imposing ticket-hall or the square in front of the station. There is a railway police station with 460 officers employed 24 hours a day, and a comprehensive system of signs, braille maps, lifts, moving stairways and walkways, and indented rubber carpets for the visually impaired or disabled. Moreover, it is open 365 days a year from 6am until midnight.

Big-Name Tenants
But it is in terms of retail that the station most impresses, and how it hopes to pull in the biggest number of customers. Its underground shopping centre, Forum Termini, was the first venue in Italy to welcome French cosmetics store Sephora and UK accessories chain Accessorize. Upstairs, Termini hosted the first Nike store in Italy. Fitness First, the UK chain, opened its first Italian venue here. Many on-site shops are the best performers for that brand nationwide, and in some cases worldwide. This is the case for Benetton. So when Grandi Stazioni’s Commercial Director, L’Abbate says only two percent of the station’s visitors actually make purchases in the station, it seems surprising. “It’s the number on which you apply it that matters,” he answers. Two percent of over 400.000 visitors a day makes over 8,000 purchases a day. Which translates into roughly three million purchases a year, given that Rome has over 150 million users a year.

The Inbox Initiative
Part of Grandi Stazioni’s success is its desire to experiment, incorporating a rather flexible, for Italy, approach to retail. An example is Inbox. “Manufacturers generally want to become retailers” explains L’Abbate, so people get to know their products directly, not just through a poster or TV campaign. The problem is most manufacturers do not know how to be retailers.” That’s where Inbox comes in. Dotted around Termini are glass Inbox kiosks selling a variety of products, usually for only a few months at a time. The appeal, says press officer Enza Spinali, is the limited risk involved and the high advertising returns. “If you are Perugina [a big Italian chocolate-maker] and you have made a new type of chocolate, you can sell it here for three months so people get to know it.”
These rotating retail spaces also offer a sort of season-proof guarantee. “If you sell sweaters, what do I do the other eight months of the year when I have a percentage-on-earnings contract with you?” asks L’Abbate. “I lose money!” Inbox represents an innovative solution. “Four months of the year we sell sweaters, and when summer arrives we sell swimsuits.” This benefits not only Grandi Stazioni. Since the manufacturers see this as a promotional tool, they are prepared to sell their products to Inbox at very low prices, meaning customers get a heavy discount.

Plans for Expansion
As the pilot project for Grandi Stazioni, Termini is the benchmark for the future. In 2000 FS sold a 40 percent stake in the company to EuroStazioni Plc, comprising Benetton, Caltagirone, Pirelli and French railways (SNCF). Then the company signed a 40-year contract to revamp Italy’s other 12 principal railway stations, turning them into focal points or piazze, a city within the city offering essential and cultural services for travellers and other citizens alike. Work has already started on Milan’s Stazione Centrale, but should be finished in all 12 within three years. Although there was “diffidence” on the part of homegrown retailers at Termini, (most of the shops that initially opened there were foreign), now foreign and national retailers are clamouring for space in the other twelve stations.
Rather surprisingly, L’Abbate sees the trains themselves as almost irrelevant. “For me the traveller doesn’t exist. Our busiest days are those with fewer trains, at weekends. If travellers have a bad experience, late trains or strikes, our service seems even more positive by contrast.” And this seems to be Grandi Stazioni’s marketing philosophy: The 5,000 or so trains leaving daily from Italy’s 13 main train stations are not the point. It’s the people not taking the trains, or who come to the station early, that interest Grandi Stazioni. As L’Abbate puts it, “We had to forget the railway station in order to create Grandi Stazioni. If we had said ‘Okay, there are the trains, what shall we do for the travellers?’ I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.”

Exporting Success
This approach seems to have succeeded. A 2003 survey showed that Rome had seen a 20 percent increase in non-train-related custom, the average stay in the station had increased from 15 to 45 minutes, and the average purchase had increased from 4 to 14 euros. The latest turnover figures are over 200 million euros. And the potential seems almost infinite. If you consider that the other 12 stations handle over 450 million visitors a year (Milan comes in second with 120 million), then at least 600 million customers already use the Grandi Stazioni network. For this reason 600 million euros are being invested in Grandi Stazioni over the next three-year period. As L’Abbate says, “This is an industrial product that can be replicated also outside Italy, you can think of it as a sort of template.” One will be exported to Prague’s central station, as well as two towns in Bohemia, followed by France, Germany and Poland.
And Termini’s makeover is not yet complete. Phase two foresees a futuristic thousand-vehicle car-park built over the platforms, including a dedicated area for tour buses, and the sprawling mess that is Piazza dei Cinquecento will be transformed into a vast pedestrian precinct by the end of 2005. It sounds almost too good to be true, but L’Abbate doesn’t think so. “When an urban area around a station gets run-down,” he explains, “the problem is not the surrounding area, it’s the station. To use a crude example, the station is the cancer and the surrounding area is the secondary growth. If you manage to resolve the first, you can begin to resolve the second.” And with that L’Abbate sets off for a meeting on various urban development projects with Rome’s city council.

Download (pdf)

Appeared in Italy Magazine in August 2004

| up |