MIL-BLQ Trenitalia Frecciarossa – Business Class

Operator: Trenitalia

Headcode: FR9653

Route:    MIL-BLQ

Class:    1^st Class – Business

Seat:     C3 S3D

Date:     Sunday 8^th January 2023

Having arrived in Milan onboard an SBB service from Zurich (read about that here), I was about halfway through my travels for the day, with two trains left to take before I arrived at my destination for the evening. The first of these was from Milano Centrale to Bologna Centrale with Trenitalia in ‘Business Class’.

Milano Centrale station is absolutely stunning and definitely deserving of its feature on ‘Architecture the Railways Built’. Thankfully, with its cavernous main hall, I was able to find a seat in a quieter area to wait the hour until my train, as the station was possibly one of the most chaotic I have experienced.

Trenitalia services are split into four classes, with first and second class nominally split into two subclasses. The cheapest option available is ‘standard class’ which gets you what 2^nd class gets you everywhere else. 2+2 seating, sockets and Wi-fi but not loads of room and certainly no freebies. The next step up is ‘premium class’, very similar to standard but with a couple of freebies and a class of travel that will be covered in next week’s post.

The third class of travel on Trenitalia is ‘business class’ which is the lower of two levels of 1^st class and the class I was travelling in on this journey and that I’ll cover in more detail shortly. The final class of travel, and the most expensive option available, is ‘executive class’. This is similar to ‘business class’ with a few extra perks such as a full meal and alcoholic drinks included.

With the platform announced and noticeably different to the one advertised, I headed to the other side of the station to find our Frecciarossa 1000 waiting on platform 3. Made up of eight cars, each Frecciarossa 1000 has one carriage for executive class, two for business class (one of these also contains the onboard bistro), one for premium class and the remaining four for standard class. My seat for the journey was in coach 3, the business class carriage shared with the bistro, and once I’d boarded I was pleased to discover some excellent large, reclining leather seats that we extremely comfortable for the hour or so journey south.

Seating in both business and executive class is the same, with the large leather seats in a 1+2 configuration, with every seat having access to a table and both European and USB sockets. There’s also free wi-fi throughout the train and once connected you can access various films, programmes and podcasts via the ‘Portale-Frecce’ app. The only slight negative to the carriage was that I thought I’d booked the quiet coach, however if I had this seemingly wasn’t advertised or enforced but thankfully, I had decent charge on my headphones.

We departed Milan one minute late and had a non-stop journey through to Bologna. Travelling on Italy’s relatively new high-speed network (it opened in 2008), the journey time for the circa 215km to Bologna was just over an hour. The high-speed network has vastly improved journey times in Italy and has led to a significant modal shift from domestic flights, with the journey from central Milan to Salerno (the destination of my train) scheduled to take 5 hours and 22 minutes.

I was pleased to discover that the automatic announcements onboard were at the very least bi-lingual with Italian and English (there was a third language thrown in on some occasions – not sure what it was!). Whilst I always appreciate English announcements when I’m abroad, I don’t expect them so its always a nice surprise to actually understand what’s going on. Thankfully there were no issues on this journey and the announcements were the standard ones about destination, next station and onboard facilities.

In terms of ‘perks’ in business class, a free non-alcoholic drink and a snack are included in the price of the ticket, and for me that was an orange juice and an amaretti biscuit. I believe there is the usual choice of soft drinks (water, orange juice, coke etc) and there is a choice between a soft and salted snack. Whilst this isn’t a full meal (you only get them in executive class) its on par or better than you get in first class with most operators in the UK.

One of the outputs of Italy’s high-speed rail development was the construction of four new deep-level underground platforms at Bologna that serve all of the high-speed services between Milan, Bologna, Rome and beyond. These platforms along with the long straight tunnels on the approaches have assisted in speeding up services as well as freeing up capacity in the main station for other services.  

Arriving into these underground platforms 3 minutes late, I started to head to the main station where my final train of the day would depart from. Whilst the new platforms are great for the train service, the connection between the main station and these is not as simple as they could be, with it taking a lift and three escalators to reach the main platforms. Not only was it quite a climb the signage was a bit hit and miss with it being excellent in some areas and non-existent in others.

My first experience of Trenitalia was a good one, with a comfortable and on time journey, excellent service and a good range of facilities. Whilst it’d be nice if business class tickets included lounge access, I understand that this would add cost and also reduce the difference between the business and executive classes. With one Trenitalia journey completed, I was looking forward to the remaining three I had booked on my trip!

Lounge              0*

Seat/Facilities     4*

Food               4*

Service             5*

Punctuality         5*

Overall Rating      18/25 (read about my rating system here!)