Last month Greenpeace released an analysis showing that taking a train is on average double the cost of flying.

The report compared the costs of flight and train tickets on 112 routes in Europe, including 94 cross-border connections.

Dardenne counters that the climate crisis is a much bigger threat to tourism and points to the example of wildfires and heatwaves in Europe this summer that have been disrupting holidays on the continent.

The European Commission has been working on an upcoming ‘Regulation on Multimodal Digital Mobility Services’ to improve the process of booking tickets across rail, bus and air.

It says this could be funded by windfall profit taxes, the phase-out of airline subsidies, and a fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions.