Until a few years ago, there was no doubt. When you wanted to take a high-speed train, it was always an AVE (High Speed Train). All you had to do was fight with the Renfe website to get the tickets you wanted, after refreshing a page that easily crashed a thousand times. However, not much was done because, at that time, traveling between Barcelona and Madrid by AVE was too expensive. Despite it being a short and comfortable journey, people often ended up choosing to travel by plane, unless the company paid.

In just one month, high-speed rail users between Barcelona and Madrid are clear: the elimination of Renfe's AVLO trains has skyrocketed prices. This has been seen by those traveling from one city to another, but also by those who took advantage of the railway operator's low-cost option to reach the Catalan capital from Tarragona, at a better price compared to the AVE.

Change of strategy on the high-speed corridor between Barcelona and Madrid, the main one in all of Spain. Renfe abandons the low cost After all the problems experienced by the Talgo trains operating this service, which forced the temporary suspension of service at the end of July, the railway operator will maintain the low-cost service on the remaining corridors served by the AVLOs, which connect Madrid with Andalusia and Galicia, despite operating on the same Talgo model.

Trains are experiencing a golden age, with record-breaking years in a row and stations packed to the rafters. Everything accelerated after the pandemic, coinciding with the liberalization of high-speed trains that began in May 2021 with the arrival of the French operator Ouigo to cover the Barcelona-Madrid route, a corridor that had only been served by Renfe's AVE (High Speed Trains) for more than ten years. A month later, Renfe's low-cost option, AVLO, came into operation, and in 2022, it was the turn of the Italian company Iryo, which over the years extended competition to the rest of Spain's corridors. This competition has driven down ticket prices, while boosting ridership and leading to more incidents on routes that were not usually problematic.