4 ms·
This so much. My biggest gripe with trains is that I am never able to actually get the logistics right. I can hop on google flights and book a multi-city trip,
by IkmoIkmo 7y ago
This so much. My biggest gripe with trains is that I am never able to actually get the logistics right.
I can hop on google flights and book a multi-city trip, I get a single price, and it's basically going to steer me towards roughly the cheapest option, within a set of parameters (e.g. trip time) that I can set.
With trains? Just nearly impossible. You get directed to different websites for price/departure/arrival/amenities information. It becomes a logistical nightmare to plan anything. When booking flights you sometimes get directed as well to multiple sites, but only for final booking, not the search stage.
And then indeed, the websites are not in English.
Or they have pricing which requires a national discount card which you don't have and can't get online, and makes the trip otherwise extremely expensive.
Or you can book your train ticket, but you have to pick up the tickets at the station, which gives anxiety because googling half of these options gets you to forums which say the ticket service is closed until 10AM, while your train arrives at the station with the service at 8AM, and the next train (for which you need to pick up the ticket) leaves at 9AM. And the only reason you know this, is because of some underground travel forum with 3 posts in the past 5 years about this train station.
Or you can only look up train tables online, but you can't even reserve tickets online, you have to buy at the station, but they can get sold out, and you're looking to buy tickets for a summer trip in 4 months, so there's literally just no way to plan any other trips or hotel reservations because you have no clue if you can be on that train, until in 4 months.
And then you have to go to a travel company which literally sends employees to buy a hundred tickets in bulk, then resells them online to you at a huge markup. But these are just 3-man companies that come and go, lots of scams, lots of markup, and they may sell only some tickets, but not others, meaning to plan a long vacation by train, you're depending on lots of these little companies.
At that point I just think, screw that, I'm just going to browse on google flights and be done with planning in 1 hour, it's cheaper, no anxiety, no stress, no dependencies, no scams, lots of insurance and assurance, all in English, mostly through reputable companies with normal UI/UX design.