I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
It might be more intuitive if this was the first travel app every developed. But I don't personally any other transit UI that uses this pattern, and that makes using the sncf search "the weird one" and not in a good way.
Google maps and Apple maps all work like SNCF. The first thing you enter is your destination and then you can optionally change the point of departure if it is not your current or default location.
I would say this is a pretty familiar and useful pattern in general: Necessary and mandatory info first, optional data which has sensible defaults later.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable,
resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open
all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and
timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that
perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget
that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with
reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian
and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious
discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and
allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper
ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses
and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine
used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket.
Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
"The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated."
For the last compensation I tried to get it took Deutsche Bahn 15 days to send an automated acknowledgement that they had received my request. I took another 20 days until they processed it.
I would not call that quick, but was it easy?
Here is the procedure for the form translated from their site:
Procedure in the digital application in the customer account:
To do this, first select the main ticket for your journey in your customer account and start the online application.
If you had no other disruptions (e.g. delay), enter "Delay of less than 60 minutes". In the next step, a new message box will appear with the following sentence: "I had additional expenses due to the delay | I was unable to use my reservation". Click on the appropriate box and follow the next steps.
Alternatively, you can also request a refund of the reservation fee in writing (informally). Please send your request to the following address:
DB Dialog GmbH
Passenger Rights Service Center
60647 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Needless to say that the form had me fill in a lot of useless stuff they either don't need to know or should know already. And of course
you can send paper...
That description of the process is quite concise I'd say? Here's how it goes for me:
1: I'm delayed by more than 20 minutes somewhere along the trip upon which a new section 'request compensation' appears in the travel schedule.
2: If upon arrival I'm delayed by more than 60/120 minutes I select that option or log in to bahn.de where I select the option from the relevant itinerary.
3: it asks me when I arrived, if this ends up being more than 60/120 minutes later than the intended arrival time it asks me if I was able to use the booking for the whole trip or whether I needed to arrange alternative transport. It also asks me whether I had extra expenses like a hotel, in the latter case it tells you to submit proof of payment - a hotel bill, a taxi bill - so they can reimburse those costs. I have never done this but my daughter has had 4 hotel stays paid by DB by now. Proof can be submitted digitally, i.e. a photo of the receipts.
4: I need to fill in the details on how I want to be reimbursed - voucher or bank transaction. I always select bank transaction and fill in my bank details (IBAN - a single bank account number which works in most of Europe).
5: I confirm the submission, get a receipt via mail and one via snail mail a few days later. It usually takes about a week or two for the money to appear in my bank account, the quickest it has ever been was 5 days.
I don't consider this to be a bad process, it works and can be completed in a few minutes at most. Yes, you can send in paper as well - this is Germany we're talking about, they love paperwork - but I've never bothered with that. I do get all those confirmations via snail mail but those don't bother me, I can watch my bank account to see when the reimbursement has been completed. I have never had any problems getting reimbursed, they always paid.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do all that in the DB app. You can manually select which seats you want or just say the types of seats you want (e.g. compartment or open area, isle or window, table or no table, quiet area or not, family area etc).
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I agree with the part about complicated tariffs/tickets but not much else. Although not sure how many countries make it simple, the only one I am aware of is Switzerland which conveniently solves the problem by making everything expensive.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
Yes, that is why, instead of using a payment network, they choose to use an app, which still needs one to transact within the financial system and lets the government adjacent company run arbitrary code on one’s phone.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
The DB app is absolute hot garbage. God forbid you don't have internet or it randomally updates logging you out. All of his previous arguments are valid.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
They also have an extensive web-based ticket shop.
You don't need to print PDF tickets. One can also show a PDF ticket on an electronic device, without printing it. I used the DB ticket PDFs for several years, without printing it. Nowadays a load the long-distance train tickets onto the phone and have it in the DB app, I have also a PDF version via mail.
> For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
I have that here also in my city. The reality: most people have a subscription, that's the by far dominant model. Simpler and less tracking needed.
> It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
Larger cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, ... are central for large traffic regions. For example the traffic region here in Hamburg serves roughly 3.7 million people.
> That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
We now have a Germany-wide affordable subscription-based ticket for local®ional public transport. That's my understanding of public transport gone digital, nation-wide. The basics were operational after only a few months of planning.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that
required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.