So, I'm off to Stockholm on holiday tomorrow, but I promised you all another episode of `adventures in customer service', and here it is (though it's not the one about NTL, because I don't right now have sufficient energy or sweet, calming beer to face writing that one down).
As you may be aware I am not a great fan of flying, and do my best to avoid it whenever possible. So, I thought, why not take the train to Stockholm? How hard could it be? For those who haven't seen it, Mark Smith's website The Man in Seat 61 will answer questions such as these; it turns out the answer is, `as hard as going from London to Brussels, from Brussels to Hamburg (overnight), from Hamburg to Copenhagen, and then from Copenhagen to Stockholm'. This takes about twenty-two hours, which might seem excessive, but it also involves precisely zero airports, which is pretty-much ideal.
Unfortunately buying tickets for European rail travel is not a simple business. Rather than just buying them from a ticket machine or a website you have to go through the tiresome and protracted business of getting a `quote' (price) from a `travel agent' (person who sits in front of a computer looking at a website which does sell the ticket you want, but to which you're not allowed access). You then hand over a fat wad of cash to pay for the tickets and keep the `travel agent' happy.
Allegedly Deutsche Bahn UK are the people to talk to in this field, so we tried them.
This began promisingly enough. I sent the people an email asking for the price of tickets on a particular set of trains and received -- less than twelve hours later! -- the reply that, for the very reasonable (they thought) sum of £636 a pair of return tickets from London to Stockholm could be mine (for comparison, tickets for the same journey on Ryanair were about £100, but obviously involved having to go through two separate airports).
So, we thought, fair enough; or, rather, not fair enough, but what can you do? (Exercise for the reader: compose a suitable rant about the evils or monopoly nationalised industries, or insufficient European integration, or whatever, to go here.) So I rang them up to buy the tickets (naturally you can't buy over the web even after getting a `quote'). And, they assured me, the tickets would soon be posted to me (paper tickets! that you can't just print out at home! how quaint!).
A little while later a chap from rang me up to explain that my credit card had been declined. Having overcome my surprise, I checked the address he was trying to put the transaction through on, corrected it, and thought no more about it.
The next day they called me to say that my card had been declined again. So I gave the chap a different credit card number, and rang my bank to find out what was going on. They told me that the transaction had not been declined, but had gone through fine; and that it had subsequently -- between the first and second phone call alleging that it had been declined -- been refunded. I was surprised at this and asked my bank to check the source and amount of the transaction; they confirmed that it was Deutsche Bahn, but that the transaction had been for £780.
This surprised me even more, given that I hadn't anticipated these muppets helping themselves to over a hundred quid more than they'd initially asked for. So I rang them again and spoke to some other idiot (one Thomas Huber) who explained that train tickets can change their prices at any time and that, therefore, DB hadn't any intention of honouring their original quote; and then spoke over me for a quarter of an hour before I finally managed to get into his thick skull the information that I'd been charged almost £150 more than quoted, without being warned that this would happen!
At this point he was struck more-or-less dumb and was able only to suggest that I contact his manager before he hung up.
Now, to pause for a moment, it's obviously true that train tickets can get more expensive with time. It's also true that Deutsche Bahn's pro-forma quotation email is worded to the effect that the price they quote is more-or-less notional and in the brief interval between their supplying it and your ringing them up the quoted price may no longer be available. So this is all fair enough, up to a point; I question whether this was actually what had happened in this case, given that in the time between their giving me a quote and my ringing them up the price of tickets on Ryanair for the same journey had not increased at all, and -- since aeroplanes are much smaller than trains -- you would expect air tickets to rise in price more quickly further in advance than do rail tickets, but who knows? I am also certain that the delay of several hours between my ringing them with my credit card details and their charging my card was due purely to their own incompetence and disorganisation rather than a scam intended to inflate the prices they're able to charge.
In any case it's absolutely not OK for them to charge me some arbitrary sum larger than that quoted without warning me that that they were about to do so; and I'm not all that hot on them lying that my credit card had been declined when they'd in fact successfully charged hundreds of pounds to it.
Anyway, needless to say, correspondence with the proffered manager (one Gill Brassington) was pretty futile. She first told me that the quote I'd been given was in fact valid for the whole of the day on which it was sent, and then refused to explain why, then, I'd been charged more than promised. She then simultaneously denied that they'd made any error by overcharging while claiming that she'd apologised for their doing so (which she hadn't -- she apologised only for ``the confusion regarding your booking from London to Stockholm'').
It would be uncharitable to assume that since she refused to acknowledge the error, overcharging me without warning was intentional. Anyway, nothing anybody at Deutsche Bahn said gave me any confidence that they wouldn't cock up (or deliberately inflate) any further transaction; indeed, they were careful to make clear that they might charge me more-or-less anything if I were foolish enough to try to buy anything from them again.
Now, while I'd more-or-less resigned myself to paying over six hundred quid to get to Stockholm and back, I was pretty unhappy about the idea of paying over seven hundred quid -- and that to a bunch of people who were not only incompetent and rude but also actually lied to me. So I decided that I would not be offering Deutsche Bahn UK the use of any more of my money.
I then looked for some other `quotes' from some other `travel agents', but tragically they were all even more expensive than Deutsche Bahn's (even after they'd added their hundred-and-fifty quid incompetence fee).
So I gave up: we're flying Ryanair.
Anyway, at the close of this fiasco, Gill Brassington sent me an email to the effect that she had no interest in explaining what the fuck she and her staff had been playing at, and that (if I had the energy to) I should write a letter to one Oliver Ueck, apparently the director of the company. Well, frankly, I can't be arsed, but I will send him the URL to this post; let's see if he has the balls to explain himself.
(As a brief digression: why are train tickets so much more expensive than air tickets? Naively I'd expect that budget airlines would have driven down the price of rail travel to something competitive, but they clearly haven't. Since rail travel is -- for people who don't mind airports -- much less convenient than air travel, I guess the passengers must mostly be (a) people who like trains, and (b) people who don't like flying. Are there really enough of these to sustain a market for long-distance rail travel at six to seven times the price of air travel? Perhaps it's like first/business-class air travel -- mostly people's employers are paying, rather than the passengers themselves. I'd also welcome any suggestions on where to buy rail tickets without being lied to, overcharged, or otherwise fucked around.)
Coming up in future episodes of `adventures in customer service': mail-order computer companies, and how none of them seem to have mastered the relatively simple provisions of the Sale of Goods Act 1979; a (very) brief discussion of the differences between `an enterprise-class data center' and `a big building full of incompetent jobsworths with air conditioning that doesn't work'; and, if you're very, very lucky -- I wasn't -- the lengthy saga of NTL and their all-encompassing hopelessness.
Comments
Posted by Pete Stevens, Wednesday, 21 September 2005 22:59 (link):
According to the RAC, it's about 1140 miles to drive one way. At typical company rates (30p/mile) that's about 684quid for two of you. Ryanair comes out at the moment at around 150-200quid for two. A better question is how can Ryanair do it so cheaply ? (answers are not limited a combination of piss poor customer service, no tax on the fuel, not having to maintain rails, gigantic subsidies / loans to aircraft manufactuers and being a cocky wanker who forces the staff to nick pens from hotels to save costs. here.)
If you want a better comparison, try a BA open return ticket.
However, having just bought something from Dell, you should be pleased that at least the sales staff for DB-UK could speak English. The person who phoned me was introduced by a colleague who answered the call as 'it appears a computer with a bad accent at dell wishes to talk to you...'
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 30 September 2005 19:13 (link):
OK, here's a paper by David Levinson on The Full Cost of Intercity Travel, analysing the comparison between rail, air and car travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco (a high-speed rail line is mooted there). He concludes that, for this journey, the costs per passenger-km are,
Los Angeles to San Francisco is about 340 miles; rail costs are dominated by the infrastructure costs, which ought to scale with distance; for air travel the costs are concentrated at the airports at each end, and don't scale with distance; and for road travel fuel and time costs (also scaling with distance) are dominant. So you'd expect these to change to further favour air travel for the longer London-to-Stockholm journey (especially because bits of the infrastructure, such as the Channel Tunnel and the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark, will have a very high per-km cost).
However, the above results -- which surprise me quite a bit, to be frank -- are for US fuel and other costs. Further, he assumes very small externality costs for air travel, which is how aviation fuel is in fact taxed (i.e., not at all), but doesn't look to me like a fair description of how much damage each mode does. Adapting this to the UK/European context would be interesting.
Posted by Nick, Thursday, 22 September 2005 00:37 (link):
I had a similar experience - in terms of cost, not customer service - looking at ways of going to Spain last year. It seems that when you start piecing together journeys across several countries the price starts going up exponentially but pre-booked internal journeys in most countries compete quite well with the cost of flying. Perhaps it's because to make the connections to allow for the shortest international rail trips, journeys between the major hubs are on trains such as the TGV, which can attract a premium price, and when those are all added together it becomes prohibitively expensive?
From what I recall, though, the prices weren't as much over the odds as you were quoted - London to Barcelona return worked out at something like £250, IIRC - so it could just be that either German, Danish or Swedish railways are expensive. And I can recommend Spanish Rail Service, who were both helpful and quick.
Posted by Alex, Thursday, 22 September 2005 11:45 (link):
I've never bought rail tickets from DB (at least not since 1995), but I'm surprised they are so incompetent given that they have the best European timetable website (rivalled in my view only by the Austrian Federal Railway's version). You'd have thought being The Agent For European Railways would be a fine commercial play to use the fact that so much of European rail traffic goes through Germany and therefore must be included in their working timetable.
But, the worst customer service experience of my life was going to the West Highlands this summer...ScotRail first of all can't book your tickets on line if you want to take a sleeper train. You have to phone them up. BUT the person who takes your call can only tell you if you can get a ticket - they cannot even tell you if there is a berth available, still less sell you one. When you intimate this to them, they have to hang up on you, call the sleeper reservations guy, find out if there are any berths and then ring you up to tell you if there are or not. And the sleeper reservation guy can't sell you a ticket, just in case you managed to hack the call centre and get through to them directly.
It gets better. You cannot make inquiries in bulk. You have to ask whether a reservation is possible for each date you are considering individually - going through this rigmarole every time. Even if you appear in person at Euston, the ticket agent can't either - they have to vanish into the depths of the building in order to make a phone call to the mystery sleeper authority because they don't have phones! Weeeellaaaarrgh!
I can't imagine that the Victorian railways can have been that inefficient without computers or even telephony. Quite simply the most stupid system you could think of.
Posted by Rachel, Thursday, 22 September 2005 15:10 (link):
Wow! They've really managed to screw that up, haven't they?
Three years ago I had a lovely sleeper trip to Scotland with my friend Rosie. The sleeper tickets were easy to book over the phone: originally I wanted to go to Inverness but we only had one week we both could go and that train was full, so he suggested the train to Aberdeen instead, and we did that. It was all very easy and straightforward.
I booked my husband and I on a sleeper to Cornwall for our honeymoon. It took three calls to the only telephone number advertised by First Great Western, which apparently is their general calls office, two of the staff were rude to me, they knew nothing about the details of the service and I had to look up the timetables online. In the end I went in person to Paddington on a day I was in London anyway and bought the tickets over the counter there. That was in fact very easy.
The promised breakfast was worse than I remembered the Scottish trip being, and there was no left luggage facility at St Austell, which given we were arriving and leaving at hours not compatible with the cottage I'd booked was very frustrating. There was no information given about the showers in Paddington on the way back, I had to trek around and find out and I'm sure we were supposed to get complimentary use but this wasn't made clear.
On the train they had a questionnaire about the sleeper service which is apparently "under review". If I were being harsh, I'd say that I reckon the train companies have realised it's an expensive service and rather than improve it and promote it and make it a "premium service" they've decided to run it down and drive people off it so that they can close it citing lack of demand.
Posted by Andrew Duffin, Thursday, 22 September 2005 15:35 (link):
Next time you might try thetrainline.com.
There's an interactive timetable that works reasonably well, and you can buy tickets on line. They are delivered by snail-mail in a day or two.
It's not world-class but it works.
Posted by Matt Freestone, Thursday, 22 September 2005 13:22 (link):
Almost uncanny timing by the BBC.
Posted by Peter Clay, Thursday, 22 September 2005 14:45 (link):
Amusingly their long circular plane journey includes a section from Basel to Frankfurt marked "hitchhiking" :)
Posted by Andrew Duffin, Thursday, 22 September 2005 15:38 (link):
Chris you must REALLY hate flying. £600 to get to Stockholm and back?
Blimey.
Last November it cost me less than that for two people to fly there and back, stay two nights in a reasonable hotel, eat and drink for two days and a night, and attend a world-class ice hockey game.
If I were you I'd start getting used to airports.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 30 September 2005 11:29 (link):
Oh, sure, and in the end we did fly. But that meant that I didn't enjoy the journey much, whereas going by train is actually enjoyable (and therefore it's not completely unreasonable to be happy to pay over the odds for it -- though five hundred quid over the odds is, as you say, pushing it a bit far).
Posted by Chris Applegate, Friday, 23 September 2005 00:40 (link):
Did you not consider a ferry? They do them from Newcastle to Gothenberg - even if you add on the train fares for each end of the journey it would have probably come under £600, and it wouldn't have taken that much longer than training it all round Europe.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Saturday, 1 October 2005 01:28 (link):
No, I hadn't, in fact. For reference, DFDS do sailings from Newcastle to Gothenburg, and the return trip for two people booked a month in advance seems to be about £200 for a cabin with a private bathroom, or about £100 for a cabin with shared bathroom. Add to that train fares from Gothenburg to/from Stockholm (~£160 for two, according to seat61.com) and London to/from Newcastle (~£100), and the total is still quite a bit more than the air fare, without being as much fun as the train (not much interesting scenery in the North Sea). Still, it has the advantage of not requiring a cross-border train ticket booking, which seems to have been the hard bit.
Posted by Matthew Turner, Friday, 23 September 2005 14:12 (link):
I looked into this a while back, this webpage was helpful
http://www.seat61.com/Sweden.htm
Posted by Danny Yee, Saturday, 24 September 2005 12:29 (link):
Yikes! That makes getting train tickets from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing look positively simple.
Wasn't European integration supposed to improve this kind of thing?
Posted by Roy Badami, Saturday, 24 September 2005 18:40 (link):
When I needed to buy a train ticket to Lisieux a few years ago I simply went to the international ticket desk at Cambridge railway station. I was most impressed with their efficiency. Ok, it took a few minutes, and involved issuing handwritten tickets for the French part of the journey, but they were able to supply me with the return to London, the return to Paris on the Eurostar, and the French tickets from Paris to Lisieux, complete with reservations.
Sadly in the time since then they've got rid of the international ticket desks at almost all UK stations; apparently it wasn't cost effective to provide the service... That's progress for you...
-roy
Posted by Chris Williams, Sunday, 25 September 2005 22:53 (link):
Reading this one, I was reminded of the time that we got the train to Copenhagen, about 6 years ago. I'd just had an eye operation, so flying was out.
We put it on a card, and they came back after charging us exactly £100 more than they said they would. We had no choice so up we paid. Train ferries are cool.
Coincidence, or a patent profit-raising mechanism?
Posted by Matthew, Monday, 26 September 2005 15:32 (link):
So, I'm utterly amazed at this, because I've done a few trips now through Deutsche Bahn (and apart from the difficulty of finding a UK phone number to call for them the first time) have had absolutely no problems. I just did a return trip to Slovenia, going London -> Brussels -> Cologne -> Salzburg -> Graz -> Pragersko -> Ptuj and coming back via a different route on a different train, and (if I hadn't lost one of my tickets) it cost me 350 quid (it would have been 100-200 pounds to fly), and took around 26 hours, including a couchette either way. The route out would have been subtly different, only Deutsche Bahn "have a fetish for short connection times" so when the Eurostar was delayed by a half hour, this screwed everything else up. Certainly in dealing with their customer service staff on the phone, I've never had any problems.
Others may correct me, but the decent international rail bookings offices are DB, RailEurope (which is the SNCF's travel-agent branding), OBB probably have one (suggested by someone else). I've not tried RailEurope, so I can't comment, but I'm pretty shocked and stunned by the behaviour of DB, as it's unlike any of the service I've experienced with them.
Posted by Chris Williams, Monday, 26 September 2005 21:58 (link):
NB - it was all a lot time ago when we got burned, so I can't remember who did it: Rail Europe sounds familiar, though. I'm pretty sure it wasn't DB.
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