Couple of years back, I made a mistake on trusting Deutsche Bahn. I took a regional train from Düsseldorf, hoping to get at some connection hub (never reached and don't remember, possibly Cologne), I have to ICE to reach Brussels. It was evening and at some point the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and an announcement followed 20 minutes later, saying the train went through the wrong tracks and it cannot return! And, we need to wait couple of hours before the rails are cleared and then we will need to get of the next station, a tiny town where only few trains run per day and none after 10pm!. Genius idea to leave people there, conductor also puts his unsatisfaction because apparently he also needs to get off there and request a ride. Let alone, I missed my connections. I had to either wait there until morning or get a ride. Never used Deutsche Bahn again, I feel less stressed by driving, even I really enjoy train rides in general.
Did I get compensation? Yes I did after four months for the ticket price only (around 40 euros), but after ridiculous process of that I need to send them forms and tickets via regular post, with a stamp that can only post within Germany. Nice try by their side..
I use DB a few dozen times per year for international trips and as such have quite a bit of experience with the problems of train travel in the former wirtschaftswunder. Yes, ICE trains are more often than not delayed and time tables are better treated as wish lists than accurate depictions of when you'll get where. Having said this I do not agree with the depiction of the restitution process, probably because I ignore the typically German paper/stamp/copy/snail-mail/triplicate_authorised_stamped_and_approved bureaucratic route and use the DB Navigator app or the bahn.de site for restitution requests for all my (many) restitution requests. Thus far I have had no problems in getting restitution for hotels, alternative transport options and the 25% (> 1 hour delay)/50% (> 2 hour delayed, all to frequent on my longer international trips) ticket price restitutions.
DB is far from perfect and the backlog in rail and rolling stock maintenance seems to drag them down more and more but they are a godsend when it comes to booking and managing international train travel. It is both far easier and generally far less expensive to book an international trip through DB than it is through e.g. the Dutch, Danish or Swedish railway operators or one of the middle-man sites like omio.se etc.
> Having said this I do not agree with the depiction of the restitution process [...] and use the DB Navigator app
Iirc they only started this possibility in june 2021. So anyone, especially foreigners, that experiences this system before then, will still know the paper only version. And 2021 is quite late to implement a digital version of that.
Ah, the DB app. I remember seeing on a ticket envelope (when ticket envelopes were still a thing), DB proudly promoting their new app, "now with delays information!". Great and sad at the same time.
That is possible, I started taking the train for these trips during the SARS2 unpleasantness so I have no information on how things worked before that time. I am 'a foreigner' (Dutchman living in Sweden) and I suspect that factor only makes it more likely for customers to use online claim requests since it is customary for international customers to interact with DB through the 'net instead of through physical locations where they keep stacks of those grey claim envelopes with forms at the ready.
I actually made money accidentally with a BahnCard subscription.
I canceled my BahnCard 50 within the first 14 days (which they have to conform to due to laws) via email (btw: before the starting date so I did not use it). They confirmed and send me back 100Euros too much money. Why 100Euro? I had originally used a coupon code that saved me 100Euro. Good guy as I am I told them via mail that they sent me too much money back. What did they say? No, can't be, Bahncard50 costs are the higher amount, the banking statement that I sent them must be of something else.
I was like... alright, no sense in arguing with them anymore.
To me it's more telling of German mentality: if I follow all the rules, then the outcome has to be correct. Tell them it's not the case, and they won't know what to do now.
I once bought a laptop at Office Depot that had some kind of discount price, then decided I didn't like the camera. When I went to return it, they refunded more than I originally paid. I also pointed this out and they said not to worry about it.
Oh, actually it started with incompetence, too: I wanted to order the BahnCard25 but payment didn't went through (and thus, I did not finish the order process). When I tried again, the coupon that I wanted to use for the Bahncard25 was exhausted. (which is why I went for BahnCard50 afterwards)
And why did I cancel the subscription anyway? Because the trip that I planned (Hamburg to Paris) and that was listed as buyable was of course everything but buyable. Always failed at the last step of ordering with some indistinct error message. Well, they really did not want my money, that much I can say.
I bought a BahnCard 50 subscription last year, for 12 months. After 11 months (=before the current subscripion expired) they automatically renewed the subscription by additional 12 months. Seeing their confirmation email I contacted them within 30mins of receiving it, politely requesting to please cancel the subscription because it was renewed without my knowledge or confirmation. My request was declined and they "offered" to cancel my BahnCard for the next year, in 13 months! Very annoying, as I even had a calender remainder set, but I didnt think they would renew before the current subscription expires. Who does that?? Also I am a good customer that has already spent thousands of € on DeutscheBahn.
This is a very German thing. Most contracts are yearly contracts the first two years, and you have to cancel at most 3 months before the next year starts.
On the third year, the contracts become monthly contracts. However, if you do any change in the contract, it starts again. For example, if you have internet for 5 years, and request a speed change, it starts again to count the 2 years.
Absolutely crazy from my non-german point of view. In my home country the first year is a full year, and it becomes monthly cancelable afterwards for things like internet, where they subsidize the installation and the modem. But in Germany, I was charged 120 dollars for the installation, and had to pay for the modem.
The trick is to cancel stuff immediately after signing up if you don't firmly plan to continue using it. It becomes effective after the minimum duration.
I started doing this for almost all subscriptions a while ago.
Presumably in response to this, some services now show a very ambiguous warning when canceling, leaving it open whether the cancellation will become effective immediately or at the end of the first subscription period.
Subscription management really ought to be taken away from the companies providing the service to the payment method (not that that's ever going to realistically happen without legislation though, due to the incentives).
I got that from Amazon Prime (free month of Prime, I never paid for it). I don't recall other services doing that, but I've also never subscribed to many of the popular ones like Netflix and such.
Once, long ago, I ended up buying the wrong ticket from Deutsche Bahn. I no longer remember whether this was my fault or theirs, but I do remember that support was completely unhelpful.
My credit card provider was considerably more helpful when I solved the problem with a chargeback.
Yes, DB tickets should only be booked via a payment provider that allows for chargebacks.
I know of instances where the end result of a more than half a year support escalation process of the highest instance said "you (the customer) did everything correctly, but our support provided wrong advice. Bad luck though, as we don't consider ourselves accountable for mistakes in the support process. Please stop contacting us."
I once bought the wrong ticket, got checked, and the staff told me I had to leave the train at the next station. The ticket I purchased was actually more expensive than the "SuperSparPreis" for the correct ticket. So, I ended up paying more and twice for this journey.
Yes but I mean, they are so inhuman. My wife was once refused migraine medication because the dokter made some mistake on receipt, they could see her in pain in the car. But computer says no.
Sure, they'll be in trouble perhaps when going against the computer, but then if no one can go against the computer, why bother with humans?
To be clear: I prefer the humans. But self-thinking ones.
Oh yeah, I've had one of those several years ago. It was a Bahn25 and I got a new one in 2 months and got sent a bill for it. Then, I called them because I couldn't cancel and I tried to tell them about this. At least at that time, the customer support knew about this sneaky practice, and would, on request, allow you to cancel it manually.
I did get a debt collectors post about my unpaid bill and I had to send around emails to them as well that I was pardoned and I didn't use the card at all. I don't remember if I got a confirmation about it and that's why I still have it on my records. After like 7 (8?) years, who knows when they would go under and then come up to me that I owe them like half a million in unpaid debt.
However, if I try to explain to them I cannot purchase tickets costing less than 4€ for reasons I simply keep to myself like they do, they hit me with a 60€ fee.
Can complain to your local MEP about that. They updated the passenger rights regulation recently, but still kept this/
Regulation (EU) 2021/782
> Railway undertakings may introduce a minimum threshold under which payments for compensation will not be paid. This threshold shall not exceed EUR 4 per ticket.
Sadly the MEPs cared more about railway companies than passengers.
>Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a well-liked (Trustpilot: 1.2/5) company running most major long-distance railways in Germany
Very confusing, the irony/sarcasm of the second part is not clear: yes it is 100% owned but 1.2 is a really bad score, Germans hate DB. That sentence if even more confusing for a German, because in Germany 1 is a good score and 5 is a fail (at school at least).
Everyone hates db. They’re a laughing stock across Europe. Switzerland have started banning them from running trains due to the knock on affects. If your long distance twin is under 2 hours late that’s a good day.
The only people who thing db are good are idiotic Brits who go “privatisation is bad we should run our railway like Germany with twice the subsidise and half the reliability”.
Not exactly how we think. We're frustrated that our private railway is worse than DB in terms of lateness and cancellations but also hugely, massively more expensive for us to use.
We'd be happy if it was publicly owned because then at least the insane profit from ticket sales might possibly just maybe make it into investment in the railway instead of someone's bonus.
Its still a private company, well 245 of them, billing each other while trying to cooperate.
This company structure was the result of the neoliberal thinking of having as much free market as possible, with the beneficial side effect of creating many highly payed board chairs for former politicians.
Today, the problems, mainly caused by cutting cost on maintenance, are so close to the surface, that even the most head-in-the-cloud establishment politicians cant spin it anymore, so the new DB ceo (Palla), tasked with "fixing it", came up with a long term plan. For decades, from every side, DB/german governments was critized for not having an articulated goal of the minimum public service that should be provided. The german governments were not directing, so 100% state _owned_ is technically true but obscures the complexity. The former ceo Mehdorn, that started this down trend did exatcly what any short-term-gain ceo would do and is, despite this blatantly failing infrastructure, still well regarded.
Today, one primary goal of this plan to fix it all, is to "reduce delays". Cuting schedules and lines will make this number up too! And so the next round of ceo bonus payments are secured and the shit show continues.
What else could you expect? A solution to fix vital infrastructure and strengthen trust in politicians and governments to cost money?! Haha.
Non-German here. What’s the point of this setup? I guess in some ways this isn’t too different than USPS, which is self-sufficient and doesn’t face tax dollars nor give its profits to the Treasury, but in our case they didn’t bother going as far to separate it as it sounds like DB did.
It is typically midway to full privatisation. It goes from being a public company (not as in publicly traded but actually of public interest) to being for-profit company but state owning all the shares. Then the state sells the majority of the shares and it becomes actually private.
Typically, on the way, there is also a separation between the "good piece" and the "bad piece" of the company, ie the company that operates the trains (and makes profit out of the passengers etc) and the one that maintains the infrastructure. The state then can sell the profit-generating part of the company to the private sector, and continue operating the non-profitable one itself, so the private capital can enjoy the best of both worlds (having a privatised train company, but still having the state eat up the economic burden of maintaining the infrastructure that the former operates on). Not sure where germany stands in this roadmap, but this is what has happened in other places (and no it did not improve the experience of passengers to any degree).
The plan was to sell the DB after privatizing but something (if I remember correct financial crisis 2008) went between it so they (politics) decided to keep the stocks.
After reunification there were two railway companies, and they got reorganized into an AG. At least later, when they restructured the company into a holding and subsidaries, they planned to privatize them completely and disolve the parent company. They never did go through with that however.
Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is... fully state-owned means it isn't privatised at all.
The issue is one of legal status. In most countries you can be a commercial company or essentially a branch of the government (leaving aside coops and charities).
So in general you have companies (legal status) but they are fully owned by the state, hence "state-owned company". "Privatized" means the government decided to sell most or all the shares to the public.
Counter example is the USPS in the US, which is an agency of the Federal government.
> Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is
Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
Now I get it, thanks for the effort of clarifying. I thought it was a misunderstanding of a niche meaning of "privatized" but it turns out, english and german do not share that meaning. Unfortunately I can't edit the comment to change the word anymore.
It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization
I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.
> Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate your requested date, as termination is only possible up to four weeks before the end of the term.
The phrase "up to four weeks before the end of the term" is misleading and can be reasonably interpreted different ways. Let's say you buy a ticket today (October 10, 2025) and it renews October 11, 2026 (one year later). Four weeks before the end of the term would be September 13, 2026 (i.e. October 11, 2026 - 4 weeks).
Since we just established that "four weeks before the end of the term" is September 13, 2026, then "Termination is only possible up to four weeks before the end of the term" can be interpreted to mean "Termination is only possible up to September 13, 2026" which means I should be able to terminate any time between now and September 13, 2026, i.e. I have a max of 11 months after date of purchase to terminate the auto-renew.
If you interpret "up to" to mean "no more than," then "up to four weeks before the end of the term" could be interpreted as any time between September 12, 2026 (four weeks before the October 10, 2026 end of the term), and October 10, 2026 (the end of term).
I'm worried about the situation when Dark Patterns are not widely recognized enough as a malicious practice for users.
Half a month ago I see someone on Twitter defending its own product design as "transparent and nothing hidden" - the "$0 now, then $15/month in 14 days" description where all text after "$0" are small and in grey. I don't think it maintains trust between the product and users, and thus it doesn't seem like a good thing.
Without knowing the product in this case, the two scenarios can be different. It one is billed $15 now refundable within 14 days, it’s more likely than not that they would forget to cancel, and therefore lose at least a month of subscription. If it’s $O, then they wouldn’t be billed for 2 weeks, and presumably have a chance to reconsider.
Don't let reddit idiots gaslight you. There are aot seriously deranged people running around on reddit, who are eating up mainstream corporate propaganda and lies without any questioning at all. I some subreddits they are the majority and paying attention to what those clowns thing can only be a negative for your own health.
I went to germany and got a DB card, for some reason despite giving them my card details, they instead asked me to pay them within 14 days (after the ticket has expired) via bank transfer or they would fine me an extra 50eur
(I checked, they never took the price of the ticket from my account initally, why not is bizzare)
I think 'ending up with an accidental BahnCard and losing a painful amount of money because of it' might be almost a rite of passage at this point.
Happened to me as well; I had a 'youth' card for people below the age of 27, even remembered that some cards auto-renew and checked online to see if mine would, because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't just get upgraded to the regular and much more expensive BahnCard... couldn't find a renewal date and thought I'd be fine. But apparently I didn't check thoroughly enough, and only got informed of now having 200€ less and a shiny new BahnCard by email. Also emailed support, also didn't get anywhere.
Later I mention this to a friend... and he says 'ah, yeah, same with me'.
I love that subscriptions in the US are (usually) immediately cancellable. Germany is the wild west of predatory subscription plans, and unfortunately the legal framework weighs heavily in favor of the businesses issuing these contracts and not the consumers.
To elaborate - in the U.S., you can usually get out of a subscription by telling your credit card to cancel the payments (or cancel the card, etc). In Germany, it's not uncommon for them to start sending you to collections if you do that, since, after all, you never cancelled the contract properly. They're not technically wrong but it's still extremely customer-hostile.
I recently decided to upgrade to BC50 again after some years of less travel and a subscription of a BC25. I went to the DB site, logged in, manually provided my BC25 card number in the order process even though it’s right there in my profile. And ended up with a second subscription: I now own both a BC25 and BC50 in parallel, which makes no sense as you can of course only use one of the two.
FYI: Unlike what you expect: bahncard50 only gives you a 50% discount on the 'flex price' and not the 'sparpreies' class of price(there it's still 25%). Flex adds some cancellation and other conveniences but is generally more expensive.
Thank you for reminding me to cancel my bahn card.
I was caught out in the same way. I now take out a BahnCard subscription online and immediately cancel it. I know I have the BahnCard for one year, and have the security that it should not automatically rollover without me having the choice.
My personal two cents: They refused to send my an invoice, so I didn't payed after their auto-removal on time. I did pay later. Then they send me to some random collections company AFTER they received my payment, according to their own data. Now they refuse to hand out a ticket to me that I payed for. I needed to travel and had already bought a ticket that relied on the Bahncard. Therefore I bought a second Bahncard, because provisional Bahncards can be handed out by the staff directly, but it's not valid for the whole direction I bought it. I expect them to still refuse to hand me my ticket and they also didn't confirm that I canceled my first Bahncard.
Also, when you buy the BahnCard via PayPal, only the first time you'll be charged via PayPal. You get an invoice later, which looks like advertising but actually tells you to provide your bank details to charge you for the subscription.
They'll send debt collectors and affect your credit rating if you don't pay for your renewal, even though it's not valid until you pay. You have to post a filled form to cancel the membership.
Commenting from neighboring Poland: my sense is that the dark patterns are less a result of deliberate manipulation and more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
It's, like, when the designs are made in a perpetual bureaucratic Kafkaesque then the results are like this. They're only building to specification, there is no UX research.
You're not going to not take the train. Not like the ticket experience is going to make a big difference with another train provider.
> more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
I would be more willing to buy that, if their support response would be different, and if it hadn't been an issue for years, including fighting legal battles to keep conditions close to what they are now.
One has to assume they are fully aware and unwilling to improve.
No not necessarily. But it might be more cost effective to get the deutschland ticket if you can still get one for this month. (You don't have to get it from DB, some allow cancellation much later.)
Ticket sales are generally quite straight forward with DB online and the area tickets are usually a good value compared to local tickets.
D-Ticket is a subscription only sold for calendar months. The basic terms are set by law, but some sellers have more generous terms, that is allowed. You need to cancel before the 10th of the current month in order not having to pay for the next month. If you buy after the 10th you are charged for 2 months right away. Most sellers require a German bank account, but e.g. HVV supports Paypal (worked for me) and in theory credit cards (did not work for me). I don't know any seller that accepts cancellations after the 10th, but I have heard a couple should exist.
That's not the case with [1], for example. They allow pausing (and then canceling) the subscription any time before the last day of the month. It works as advertised in my experience.
[2] seems to be offering the same, but I haven't tried it myself. [3] looks interesting too.
See, this is not making me feel good about the deutchland ticket.
My understanding is that the Bavarian day ticket can still be purchased as a piece of paper from a kiosk at the station and we would print our names on it (2 adults, 3 kids). This seems so much easier than worrying about starting and stopping a subscription!
How much of this could be prevented by having pre-paid visa card that usually has 0 euro on it, and you charge it just before paying for something, so if something accidentally turns out to be a subscription it won't be able to auto-renew?
German companies usually will send you to collections in the case of failure to pay for renewal with the provided process. I don't know how successful they are at it though.
The part about them being a company "with no reputation to loose" really hits home. If you know your customer is going to hate you, because you suck at being a reliable service provider, then them hating you also because you scammed them for 500 Euros is no loss at all. The actual difference in reputation is marginal.
They also do not really suffer any financial damage. They do not have competition and no matter how badly run their business is, their losses are paid for by the tax payer.
Sadly, Deutsche Bahn has become, for me, a symbol of how Germany is going downhill.
I got a BahnCard 25 for 3 months, and one month before it expired, it automatically renewed for a full year. Even though I canceled it, I still had to pay for the entire year.
I bought a train ticket to Austria, and they announced strikes just five days before my trip. They didn’t refund my money directly. I had to fill out a form in person at DB, and I only got 80% of the money back.
The trains are unreliable; they are often delayed.
Also you can cancel your Deutschlandticket only before the 15th of the month.
And somehow getting a Deutschlandticket not starting at the first of the month is impossible.
It's all around scams and it's utterly embarrassing that 210k people are actually employed in Germany for this. There are people who get payed for implementing dark patterns as a government service to get a little bit more money.
That seems to me to be a direct result of too many actors involved in the creation of the Deutschlandticket actually ebing against this ticket, and so those in favor tried to appease them and created this absolut disaster of a booking process. There is no other reason for this otherwise, and it would be trivial to sort this out by e.g. having a validity period of 31 days, or always going until the end of the month and costing only a percentage. But that would be too easy.
Just get your Deutschlandticket from a more customer friendly reseller.
There are a few that let you cancel before the last day of the month, and even let you add the ticket to Apple/Google Wallet so you don't need to depend on some mediocre app having a good enough day to display your ticket during an inspection.
Ah yes the DB app where it's adviced to screenshot your ticket because it WILL disappear when you get checked and you will be blamed and are at fault...
Ironically, the folks here that have made experience with the state operated railway (Deutsche Bundesbahn) back when it existed (until 1993) say mostly positive things, especially compared to today.
The modern German railway is a combination of both the state and a private company. So we get a for-profit monopoly that's ripping you off but also gets subsidized by the state. The worst of both worlds.
This model of kind-of privatization is used in Germany in a few areas and it's god awful for everyone involved, like with the hospitals.
I don't like falling politics especially here on HN but I cannot for the life of me understand why this model is still being defended by some people.
Same reason journalists are defending fascism, they stand to make a profit (or think they do). You can always follow the money to find out why people are making decisions that are seemingly stupid.
What I think is that a system which has as its goal extracting profit for investors doesn't work for public services which do not respond properly to market forces.
Natural monopolies, services in which profit is extracted at the cost of benefit, and inelastic services which are bound to wellbeing are some examples.
"Soft" factors matter when it comes to public transit attractiveness.
A mix of various forms of customer hostility and stupidity (from not providing data about some transit connection to Google Maps to an insanely convoluted ticketing scheme to inflexible fare rules if you don't want to pay insane amounts) resulted in me taking a car for a trip that could and otherwise would have been done by public transit.
I hate driving (why would I spend an hour doing work/paying attention when I could read a book), and would still consider doing it again for that connection just to avoid dealing with the bullshit.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland one ticket mostly gets you from A to B, even if that involves a boat, a tram, a train, and a bus. Oh, and they'll be on time too.
Last year I got a yearly membership for the Copenhagen Zoo.
As time was running up, I was reminded to renew the membership.
If I didn't, the membership would get cancelled.
If I did, the membership would turn on auto-renewal.
So they auto-renew memberships once you've paid twice.
This ensures that people who get auto-renewed but forgot about it at least liked renewing once.
Auto-renewal of subscriptions supposed to be a feature for veterans of a service, and not something to cheat people out of their money after they never get a good return of investment the first time.
Just to give Kagi some credit here: They have a friendly reminder every month that my subscription is about to renew. Every month I'm given the chance to cancel, and every month I'm reminded of what a decent service that is. It surely does mean they'll lose some customers. But it also means that those who stay, stay forever.
Auto-renew should be on first use within the month of the renewal. renewing something that someone doesn't use is bad, but if they are using it that is good. Better yet, if someone didn't use the subscription enough to be worth the yearly fee get confirmation they want to.
I never sign up for subscriptions anymore without using a virtual card. Once I've paid the yearly fee, I immediately cancel the card. When it comes to renew, they'll be very keen to let me know that my card needs updating.
OMG yes this keeps biting me in the ass and is so absolutely infuriating, I feel scammed every time I fail to cancel it (probably needs a blood/urine sample, sent by post). There are no words for how much I hate Deutsche Bahn, Germany's 2nd biggest shame.
I didn't expect, and you probably don't imagine how difficult is to buy Deutsche Bahn ticket. For sanity I was buying with cash at the ticket office. The queue was long, the service was rude, but at least I bought the right ticket. For international travel I was always buying online on the website of the other railways - magically it was not only easier but also cheaper.
So many subscription-based things in Germany are outright scams that would be criminal elsewhere.
Mobile phone contracts, internet service contracts principally among them. Two year contracts that auto renew and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew.
Parship used to do this (not sure about their current practices, this was years ago): I once had a six-month subscription that would automatically extend by a year if you didn't cancel at least three months in advance (by letter or fax!). Especially dodgy in that line of business, because if you get lucky shortly before subscription runs out, you're literally giving away a year's worth of subscription that you're not going to use at all.
Many commercial leases run in 5-year increments with 2 5 year auto-renewals and a 90-180 day window in which to exercise the opt-out of auto-renewal. That window is often not set to end coincident with the end of the lease term for obvious reasons.
My favorite trick by various German service providers is impossibility to cancel. Like literally it's impossible. You cancel, you show deregistration from current address but they say "rejected, you can still use our service at the new address". Got fuck yourself and rot in hell.
I wonder if they'll accept registration forms foreign countries, e.g. of "Herr Muller is now a resident of Timbuktu"...
Or apparently it's possible to deregister moving to a foreign country with "address unknown", but I guess it'd have to be plausible when you claim "Oh I'm going to cycle around the world for 5 years"...
Speaking of experience from a friend that moved from Germany to another country and wanted to cancel his phone provider: No, this doesn't work, you can't cancel prematurely and you must pay the full amount. I think it was Congstar (subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom).
I recall I was once on a Deutsche Bahn train, it was delayed more than an hour (not that I cared I wasn't in a rush). One worker came around handing out envelopes, since everyone was entitled to a partial refund, I had to sign it, and then mail it back to them? What the fuck? Not even Hitler would've allowed this
It's an automated process nowadays if you purchase your tickets via their app. (Which in turn acts as KYC and makes it impossible to travel anonymously.)
Couple of years back, I made a mistake on trusting Deutsche Bahn. I took a regional train from Düsseldorf, hoping to get at some connection hub (never reached and don't remember, possibly Cologne), I have to ICE to reach Brussels. It was evening and at some point the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and an announcement followed 20 minutes later, saying the train went through the wrong tracks and it cannot return! And, we need to wait couple of hours before the rails are cleared and then we will need to get of the next station, a tiny town where only few trains run per day and none after 10pm!. Genius idea to leave people there, conductor also puts his unsatisfaction because apparently he also needs to get off there and request a ride. Let alone, I missed my connections. I had to either wait there until morning or get a ride. Never used Deutsche Bahn again, I feel less stressed by driving, even I really enjoy train rides in general.
Did I get compensation? Yes I did after four months for the ticket price only (around 40 euros), but after ridiculous process of that I need to send them forms and tickets via regular post, with a stamp that can only post within Germany. Nice try by their side..
I use DB a few dozen times per year for international trips and as such have quite a bit of experience with the problems of train travel in the former wirtschaftswunder. Yes, ICE trains are more often than not delayed and time tables are better treated as wish lists than accurate depictions of when you'll get where. Having said this I do not agree with the depiction of the restitution process, probably because I ignore the typically German paper/stamp/copy/snail-mail/triplicate_authorised_stamped_and_approved bureaucratic route and use the DB Navigator app or the bahn.de site for restitution requests for all my (many) restitution requests. Thus far I have had no problems in getting restitution for hotels, alternative transport options and the 25% (> 1 hour delay)/50% (> 2 hour delayed, all to frequent on my longer international trips) ticket price restitutions.
DB is far from perfect and the backlog in rail and rolling stock maintenance seems to drag them down more and more but they are a godsend when it comes to booking and managing international train travel. It is both far easier and generally far less expensive to book an international trip through DB than it is through e.g. the Dutch, Danish or Swedish railway operators or one of the middle-man sites like omio.se etc.
> Having said this I do not agree with the depiction of the restitution process [...] and use the DB Navigator app
Iirc they only started this possibility in june 2021. So anyone, especially foreigners, that experiences this system before then, will still know the paper only version. And 2021 is quite late to implement a digital version of that.
Ah, the DB app. I remember seeing on a ticket envelope (when ticket envelopes were still a thing), DB proudly promoting their new app, "now with delays information!". Great and sad at the same time.
That is possible, I started taking the train for these trips during the SARS2 unpleasantness so I have no information on how things worked before that time. I am 'a foreigner' (Dutchman living in Sweden) and I suspect that factor only makes it more likely for customers to use online claim requests since it is customary for international customers to interact with DB through the 'net instead of through physical locations where they keep stacks of those grey claim envelopes with forms at the ready.
I actually made money accidentally with a BahnCard subscription. I canceled my BahnCard 50 within the first 14 days (which they have to conform to due to laws) via email (btw: before the starting date so I did not use it). They confirmed and send me back 100Euros too much money. Why 100Euro? I had originally used a coupon code that saved me 100Euro. Good guy as I am I told them via mail that they sent me too much money back. What did they say? No, can't be, Bahncard50 costs are the higher amount, the banking statement that I sent them must be of something else.
I was like... alright, no sense in arguing with them anymore.
To me it's more telling of German mentality: if I follow all the rules, then the outcome has to be correct. Tell them it's not the case, and they won't know what to do now.
I once bought a laptop at Office Depot that had some kind of discount price, then decided I didn't like the camera. When I went to return it, they refunded more than I originally paid. I also pointed this out and they said not to worry about it.
If the incompetence works in this direction too, then at least we're sure this is true incompetence and not malice..
Oh, actually it started with incompetence, too: I wanted to order the BahnCard25 but payment didn't went through (and thus, I did not finish the order process). When I tried again, the coupon that I wanted to use for the Bahncard25 was exhausted. (which is why I went for BahnCard50 afterwards)
And why did I cancel the subscription anyway? Because the trip that I planned (Hamburg to Paris) and that was listed as buyable was of course everything but buyable. Always failed at the last step of ordering with some indistinct error message. Well, they really did not want my money, that much I can say.
Yes, somehow landlords are always "incompetent" to their benefit.
I bought a BahnCard 50 subscription last year, for 12 months. After 11 months (=before the current subscripion expired) they automatically renewed the subscription by additional 12 months. Seeing their confirmation email I contacted them within 30mins of receiving it, politely requesting to please cancel the subscription because it was renewed without my knowledge or confirmation. My request was declined and they "offered" to cancel my BahnCard for the next year, in 13 months! Very annoying, as I even had a calender remainder set, but I didnt think they would renew before the current subscription expires. Who does that?? Also I am a good customer that has already spent thousands of € on DeutscheBahn.
This is a very German thing. Most contracts are yearly contracts the first two years, and you have to cancel at most 3 months before the next year starts.
On the third year, the contracts become monthly contracts. However, if you do any change in the contract, it starts again. For example, if you have internet for 5 years, and request a speed change, it starts again to count the 2 years.
Absolutely crazy from my non-german point of view. In my home country the first year is a full year, and it becomes monthly cancelable afterwards for things like internet, where they subsidize the installation and the modem. But in Germany, I was charged 120 dollars for the installation, and had to pay for the modem.
The trick is to cancel stuff immediately after signing up if you don't firmly plan to continue using it. It becomes effective after the minimum duration.
I started doing this for almost all subscriptions a while ago.
Presumably in response to this, some services now show a very ambiguous warning when canceling, leaving it open whether the cancellation will become effective immediately or at the end of the first subscription period.
Subscription management really ought to be taken away from the companies providing the service to the payment method (not that that's ever going to realistically happen without legislation though, due to the incentives).
I got that from Amazon Prime (free month of Prime, I never paid for it). I don't recall other services doing that, but I've also never subscribed to many of the popular ones like Netflix and such.
Apple's various services do it too, but not consistently, and usually only for free trials (in which case, fair enough to be honest).
they did the same to me, 20 years ago, i complained and got my money back, i thought this was not leagal anymore
Once, long ago, I ended up buying the wrong ticket from Deutsche Bahn. I no longer remember whether this was my fault or theirs, but I do remember that support was completely unhelpful.
My credit card provider was considerably more helpful when I solved the problem with a chargeback.
Yes, DB tickets should only be booked via a payment provider that allows for chargebacks.
I know of instances where the end result of a more than half a year support escalation process of the highest instance said "you (the customer) did everything correctly, but our support provided wrong advice. Bad luck though, as we don't consider ourselves accountable for mistakes in the support process. Please stop contacting us."
I once bought the wrong ticket, got checked, and the staff told me I had to leave the train at the next station. The ticket I purchased was actually more expensive than the "SuperSparPreis" for the correct ticket. So, I ended up paying more and twice for this journey.
This is the type of staff that can easily be replaced by computers.
unless there's a union
Yes but I mean, they are so inhuman. My wife was once refused migraine medication because the dokter made some mistake on receipt, they could see her in pain in the car. But computer says no.
Sure, they'll be in trouble perhaps when going against the computer, but then if no one can go against the computer, why bother with humans?
To be clear: I prefer the humans. But self-thinking ones.
I bought the wrong ticket for a plane once and they wouldn’t even let me on until I spent an absolute fortune on a walk up fare.
Oh yeah, I've had one of those several years ago. It was a Bahn25 and I got a new one in 2 months and got sent a bill for it. Then, I called them because I couldn't cancel and I tried to tell them about this. At least at that time, the customer support knew about this sneaky practice, and would, on request, allow you to cancel it manually.
I did get a debt collectors post about my unpaid bill and I had to send around emails to them as well that I was pardoned and I didn't use the card at all. I don't remember if I got a confirmation about it and that's why I still have it on my records. After like 7 (8?) years, who knows when they would go under and then come up to me that I owe them like half a million in unpaid debt.
Every cent counts.
What is wrong is that this behaviour is being perpetrated by an organisation that one would not expect to see it.
Edit: Every 500 euros count…
“ Today is about dark patterns that cost me 500€ for nothing.”
When they owe you money, they refuse to pay up if it's less than 4€: https://preview.redd.it/danke-db-es-geht-mir-nicht-um-die-3-...
However, if I try to explain to them I cannot purchase tickets costing less than 4€ for reasons I simply keep to myself like they do, they hit me with a 60€ fee.
Can complain to your local MEP about that. They updated the passenger rights regulation recently, but still kept this/
Regulation (EU) 2021/782
> Railway undertakings may introduce a minimum threshold under which payments for compensation will not be paid. This threshold shall not exceed EUR 4 per ticket.
Sadly the MEPs cared more about railway companies than passengers.
Every 3.99€ counts… It sucks. Last time I had similar dispute with IRS :)
I think after 3 years it is "verjährt."
But your credit ranking like "Schufa" might still be affected.
>Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a well-liked (Trustpilot: 1.2/5) company running most major long-distance railways in Germany
Very confusing, the irony/sarcasm of the second part is not clear: yes it is 100% owned but 1.2 is a really bad score, Germans hate DB. That sentence if even more confusing for a German, because in Germany 1 is a good score and 5 is a fail (at school at least).
In English the sarcasm is quite obvious.
Everyone hates db. They’re a laughing stock across Europe. Switzerland have started banning them from running trains due to the knock on affects. If your long distance twin is under 2 hours late that’s a good day.
The only people who thing db are good are idiotic Brits who go “privatisation is bad we should run our railway like Germany with twice the subsidise and half the reliability”.
Idiotic Brit here.
Not exactly how we think. We're frustrated that our private railway is worse than DB in terms of lateness and cancellations but also hugely, massively more expensive for us to use.
We'd be happy if it was publicly owned because then at least the insane profit from ticket sales might possibly just maybe make it into investment in the railway instead of someone's bonus.
DB is privatized though?
It's not fully state owned, it's semi-privatized. You get the worst of both worlds, so to speak.
It is privatized, but it is fully state owned. The country of germany owns 100% of the stock.
> Sie [DB AG] befindet sich zu 100 Prozent im Eigentum des Bundes
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Standardar...
Its still a private company, well 245 of them, billing each other while trying to cooperate.
This company structure was the result of the neoliberal thinking of having as much free market as possible, with the beneficial side effect of creating many highly payed board chairs for former politicians.
Today, the problems, mainly caused by cutting cost on maintenance, are so close to the surface, that even the most head-in-the-cloud establishment politicians cant spin it anymore, so the new DB ceo (Palla), tasked with "fixing it", came up with a long term plan. For decades, from every side, DB/german governments was critized for not having an articulated goal of the minimum public service that should be provided. The german governments were not directing, so 100% state _owned_ is technically true but obscures the complexity. The former ceo Mehdorn, that started this down trend did exatcly what any short-term-gain ceo would do and is, despite this blatantly failing infrastructure, still well regarded.
Today, one primary goal of this plan to fix it all, is to "reduce delays". Cuting schedules and lines will make this number up too! And so the next round of ceo bonus payments are secured and the shit show continues.
What else could you expect? A solution to fix vital infrastructure and strengthen trust in politicians and governments to cost money?! Haha.
> The former ceo Mehdorn [...] is, [...] still well regarded.
Citation needed.
Non-German here. What’s the point of this setup? I guess in some ways this isn’t too different than USPS, which is self-sufficient and doesn’t face tax dollars nor give its profits to the Treasury, but in our case they didn’t bother going as far to separate it as it sounds like DB did.
It is typically midway to full privatisation. It goes from being a public company (not as in publicly traded but actually of public interest) to being for-profit company but state owning all the shares. Then the state sells the majority of the shares and it becomes actually private.
Typically, on the way, there is also a separation between the "good piece" and the "bad piece" of the company, ie the company that operates the trains (and makes profit out of the passengers etc) and the one that maintains the infrastructure. The state then can sell the profit-generating part of the company to the private sector, and continue operating the non-profitable one itself, so the private capital can enjoy the best of both worlds (having a privatised train company, but still having the state eat up the economic burden of maintaining the infrastructure that the former operates on). Not sure where germany stands in this roadmap, but this is what has happened in other places (and no it did not improve the experience of passengers to any degree).
The plan was to sell the DB after privatizing but something (if I remember correct financial crisis 2008) went between it so they (politics) decided to keep the stocks.
After reunification there were two railway companies, and they got reorganized into an AG. At least later, when they restructured the company into a holding and subsidaries, they planned to privatize them completely and disolve the parent company. They never did go through with that however.
Why they went with an AG in 1993, I don't know.
Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is... fully state-owned means it isn't privatised at all.
The issue is one of legal status. In most countries you can be a commercial company or essentially a branch of the government (leaving aside coops and charities).
So in general you have companies (legal status) but they are fully owned by the state, hence "state-owned company". "Privatized" means the government decided to sell most or all the shares to the public.
Counter example is the USPS in the US, which is an agency of the Federal government.
> Not sure what your definition of "privatized" is
Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
Yes, that's exactly what I explained in term of legal status, but that's not what "privatized" means.
Now I get it, thanks for the effort of clarifying. I thought it was a misunderstanding of a niche meaning of "privatized" but it turns out, english and german do not share that meaning. Unfortunately I can't edit the comment to change the word anymore.
It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.
"Bahnprivatisierung" is the official term for what happened to the German railway in the 90s. I think this it what the term means.
> Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate your requested date, as termination is only possible up to four weeks before the end of the term.
The phrase "up to four weeks before the end of the term" is misleading and can be reasonably interpreted different ways. Let's say you buy a ticket today (October 10, 2025) and it renews October 11, 2026 (one year later). Four weeks before the end of the term would be September 13, 2026 (i.e. October 11, 2026 - 4 weeks).
Since we just established that "four weeks before the end of the term" is September 13, 2026, then "Termination is only possible up to four weeks before the end of the term" can be interpreted to mean "Termination is only possible up to September 13, 2026" which means I should be able to terminate any time between now and September 13, 2026, i.e. I have a max of 11 months after date of purchase to terminate the auto-renew.
What other interpretation is there?
If you interpret "up to" to mean "no more than," then "up to four weeks before the end of the term" could be interpreted as any time between September 12, 2026 (four weeks before the October 10, 2026 end of the term), and October 10, 2026 (the end of term).
Oh, you're right. I guess I default to the less customer-friendly interpretation when it comes to subscriptions.
I'm worried about the situation when Dark Patterns are not widely recognized enough as a malicious practice for users.
Half a month ago I see someone on Twitter defending its own product design as "transparent and nothing hidden" - the "$0 now, then $15/month in 14 days" description where all text after "$0" are small and in grey. I don't think it maintains trust between the product and users, and thus it doesn't seem like a good thing.
Without knowing the product in this case, the two scenarios can be different. It one is billed $15 now refundable within 14 days, it’s more likely than not that they would forget to cancel, and therefore lose at least a month of subscription. If it’s $O, then they wouldn’t be billed for 2 weeks, and presumably have a chance to reconsider.
For anyone wondering seems to be this post: https://x.com/zilvestro/status/1967567592358289904
> "transparent and nothing hidden"
That's the response I got on from quite a few people on german speeaking reddit, also calling me an idiot :)
Don't let reddit idiots gaslight you. There are aot seriously deranged people running around on reddit, who are eating up mainstream corporate propaganda and lies without any questioning at all. I some subreddits they are the majority and paying attention to what those clowns thing can only be a negative for your own health.
I went to germany and got a DB card, for some reason despite giving them my card details, they instead asked me to pay them within 14 days (after the ticket has expired) via bank transfer or they would fine me an extra 50eur
(I checked, they never took the price of the ticket from my account initally, why not is bizzare)
I think 'ending up with an accidental BahnCard and losing a painful amount of money because of it' might be almost a rite of passage at this point.
Happened to me as well; I had a 'youth' card for people below the age of 27, even remembered that some cards auto-renew and checked online to see if mine would, because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't just get upgraded to the regular and much more expensive BahnCard... couldn't find a renewal date and thought I'd be fine. But apparently I didn't check thoroughly enough, and only got informed of now having 200€ less and a shiny new BahnCard by email. Also emailed support, also didn't get anywhere.
Later I mention this to a friend... and he says 'ah, yeah, same with me'.
I love that subscriptions in the US are (usually) immediately cancellable. Germany is the wild west of predatory subscription plans, and unfortunately the legal framework weighs heavily in favor of the businesses issuing these contracts and not the consumers.
To elaborate - in the U.S., you can usually get out of a subscription by telling your credit card to cancel the payments (or cancel the card, etc). In Germany, it's not uncommon for them to start sending you to collections if you do that, since, after all, you never cancelled the contract properly. They're not technically wrong but it's still extremely customer-hostile.
I guess there are some upsides to litigation being horrendously expensive.
I recently decided to upgrade to BC50 again after some years of less travel and a subscription of a BC25. I went to the DB site, logged in, manually provided my BC25 card number in the order process even though it’s right there in my profile. And ended up with a second subscription: I now own both a BC25 and BC50 in parallel, which makes no sense as you can of course only use one of the two.
…
FYI: Unlike what you expect: bahncard50 only gives you a 50% discount on the 'flex price' and not the 'sparpreies' class of price(there it's still 25%). Flex adds some cancellation and other conveniences but is generally more expensive.
Thank you for reminding me to cancel my bahn card.
I was caught out in the same way. I now take out a BahnCard subscription online and immediately cancel it. I know I have the BahnCard for one year, and have the security that it should not automatically rollover without me having the choice.
My personal two cents: They refused to send my an invoice, so I didn't payed after their auto-removal on time. I did pay later. Then they send me to some random collections company AFTER they received my payment, according to their own data. Now they refuse to hand out a ticket to me that I payed for. I needed to travel and had already bought a ticket that relied on the Bahncard. Therefore I bought a second Bahncard, because provisional Bahncards can be handed out by the staff directly, but it's not valid for the whole direction I bought it. I expect them to still refuse to hand me my ticket and they also didn't confirm that I canceled my first Bahncard.
Also, when you buy the BahnCard via PayPal, only the first time you'll be charged via PayPal. You get an invoice later, which looks like advertising but actually tells you to provide your bank details to charge you for the subscription.
They'll send debt collectors and affect your credit rating if you don't pay for your renewal, even though it's not valid until you pay. You have to post a filled form to cancel the membership.
Commenting from neighboring Poland: my sense is that the dark patterns are less a result of deliberate manipulation and more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
It's, like, when the designs are made in a perpetual bureaucratic Kafkaesque then the results are like this. They're only building to specification, there is no UX research.
You're not going to not take the train. Not like the ticket experience is going to make a big difference with another train provider.
> more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development.
I would be more willing to buy that, if their support response would be different, and if it hadn't been an issue for years, including fighting legal battles to keep conditions close to what they are now.
One has to assume they are fully aware and unwilling to improve.
> > more a result of crappy publicly funded tendered software development. > One has to assume they are fully aware and unwilling to improve.
Both can be true at the same time.
I was going to be in the Munich area next month and was planning on using the DB Bavarian regional day ticket quite a bit. Is this a bad idea?
No not necessarily. But it might be more cost effective to get the deutschland ticket if you can still get one for this month. (You don't have to get it from DB, some allow cancellation much later.)
Ticket sales are generally quite straight forward with DB online and the area tickets are usually a good value compared to local tickets.
You can always get one for the current month and (except for maybe the last day) immediately cancel it with some sellers.
D-Ticket is a subscription only sold for calendar months. The basic terms are set by law, but some sellers have more generous terms, that is allowed. You need to cancel before the 10th of the current month in order not having to pay for the next month. If you buy after the 10th you are charged for 2 months right away. Most sellers require a German bank account, but e.g. HVV supports Paypal (worked for me) and in theory credit cards (did not work for me). I don't know any seller that accepts cancellations after the 10th, but I have heard a couple should exist.
That's not the case with [1], for example. They allow pausing (and then canceling) the subscription any time before the last day of the month. It works as advertised in my experience.
[2] seems to be offering the same, but I haven't tried it myself. [3] looks interesting too.
[1] https://www.ticket-plus.app/en/
[2] https://www.mopla.solutions/de/tickets/deutschlandticket
[3] https://deutschland-ticket.store/autobus-oberbayern?lang=en
See, this is not making me feel good about the deutchland ticket.
My understanding is that the Bavarian day ticket can still be purchased as a piece of paper from a kiosk at the station and we would print our names on it (2 adults, 3 kids). This seems so much easier than worrying about starting and stopping a subscription!
https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/regional/regional-day-ticket-b...
This hits so hard. I just looked up my own BahnCard 25, turns out that I'm a week too late for cancellation. Another year it is then.
Was Tablet Magazine syndicated article in the vein of Huxley's somatic aspect of transcription.
Alternatively, Wender's credits, for the American Friend was the procuring of a series of gaffers to film the long-shot of Hamburg.
[1]:https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nat...
How much of this could be prevented by having pre-paid visa card that usually has 0 euro on it, and you charge it just before paying for something, so if something accidentally turns out to be a subscription it won't be able to auto-renew?
German companies usually will send you to collections in the case of failure to pay for renewal with the provided process. I don't know how successful they are at it though.
The part about them being a company "with no reputation to loose" really hits home. If you know your customer is going to hate you, because you suck at being a reliable service provider, then them hating you also because you scammed them for 500 Euros is no loss at all. The actual difference in reputation is marginal.
They also do not really suffer any financial damage. They do not have competition and no matter how badly run their business is, their losses are paid for by the tax payer.
i swear the biggest gangsters on the planet are deutsche bahn
Thanks for the reminder to cancel my Bahncard, last time I forgot.
Sadly, Deutsche Bahn has become, for me, a symbol of how Germany is going downhill.
I got a BahnCard 25 for 3 months, and one month before it expired, it automatically renewed for a full year. Even though I canceled it, I still had to pay for the entire year.
I bought a train ticket to Austria, and they announced strikes just five days before my trip. They didn’t refund my money directly. I had to fill out a form in person at DB, and I only got 80% of the money back.
The trains are unreliable; they are often delayed.
Also you can cancel your Deutschlandticket only before the 15th of the month. And somehow getting a Deutschlandticket not starting at the first of the month is impossible.
It's all around scams and it's utterly embarrassing that 210k people are actually employed in Germany for this. There are people who get payed for implementing dark patterns as a government service to get a little bit more money.
That seems to me to be a direct result of too many actors involved in the creation of the Deutschlandticket actually ebing against this ticket, and so those in favor tried to appease them and created this absolut disaster of a booking process. There is no other reason for this otherwise, and it would be trivial to sort this out by e.g. having a validity period of 31 days, or always going until the end of the month and costing only a percentage. But that would be too easy.
Just get your Deutschlandticket from a more customer friendly reseller.
There are a few that let you cancel before the last day of the month, and even let you add the ticket to Apple/Google Wallet so you don't need to depend on some mediocre app having a good enough day to display your ticket during an inspection.
Ah yes the DB app where it's adviced to screenshot your ticket because it WILL disappear when you get checked and you will be blamed and are at fault...
And people think the government has their best interests in mind.
Ironically, the folks here that have made experience with the state operated railway (Deutsche Bundesbahn) back when it existed (until 1993) say mostly positive things, especially compared to today. The modern German railway is a combination of both the state and a private company. So we get a for-profit monopoly that's ripping you off but also gets subsidized by the state. The worst of both worlds.
This model of kind-of privatization is used in Germany in a few areas and it's god awful for everyone involved, like with the hospitals.
I don't like falling politics especially here on HN but I cannot for the life of me understand why this model is still being defended by some people.
I think it has less to do with the corporate structure and more to do with the cumulative effects of decades of neglected investments
Which happened due to the corporate structure.
Same reason journalists are defending fascism, they stand to make a profit (or think they do). You can always follow the money to find out why people are making decisions that are seemingly stupid.
Oh there's definetly people profiting from it but I think there's also plenty of cases where Hanlon's Razor applies.
I don't know anyone who thinks that.
What I think is that a system which has as its goal extracting profit for investors doesn't work for public services which do not respond properly to market forces.
Natural monopolies, services in which profit is extracted at the cost of benefit, and inelastic services which are bound to wellbeing are some examples.
"Soft" factors matter when it comes to public transit attractiveness.
A mix of various forms of customer hostility and stupidity (from not providing data about some transit connection to Google Maps to an insanely convoluted ticketing scheme to inflexible fare rules if you don't want to pay insane amounts) resulted in me taking a car for a trip that could and otherwise would have been done by public transit.
I hate driving (why would I spend an hour doing work/paying attention when I could read a book), and would still consider doing it again for that connection just to avoid dealing with the bullshit.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland one ticket mostly gets you from A to B, even if that involves a boat, a tram, a train, and a bus. Oh, and they'll be on time too.
Last year I got a yearly membership for the Copenhagen Zoo.
As time was running up, I was reminded to renew the membership.
If I didn't, the membership would get cancelled.
If I did, the membership would turn on auto-renewal.
So they auto-renew memberships once you've paid twice.
This ensures that people who get auto-renewed but forgot about it at least liked renewing once.
Auto-renewal of subscriptions supposed to be a feature for veterans of a service, and not something to cheat people out of their money after they never get a good return of investment the first time.
Just to give Kagi some credit here: They have a friendly reminder every month that my subscription is about to renew. Every month I'm given the chance to cancel, and every month I'm reminded of what a decent service that is. It surely does mean they'll lose some customers. But it also means that those who stay, stay forever.
Auto-renew should be on first use within the month of the renewal. renewing something that someone doesn't use is bad, but if they are using it that is good. Better yet, if someone didn't use the subscription enough to be worth the yearly fee get confirmation they want to.
I never sign up for subscriptions anymore without using a virtual card. Once I've paid the yearly fee, I immediately cancel the card. When it comes to renew, they'll be very keen to let me know that my card needs updating.
OMG yes this keeps biting me in the ass and is so absolutely infuriating, I feel scammed every time I fail to cancel it (probably needs a blood/urine sample, sent by post). There are no words for how much I hate Deutsche Bahn, Germany's 2nd biggest shame.
I didn't expect, and you probably don't imagine how difficult is to buy Deutsche Bahn ticket. For sanity I was buying with cash at the ticket office. The queue was long, the service was rude, but at least I bought the right ticket. For international travel I was always buying online on the website of the other railways - magically it was not only easier but also cheaper.
So many subscription-based things in Germany are outright scams that would be criminal elsewhere.
Mobile phone contracts, internet service contracts principally among them. Two year contracts that auto renew and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew.
> Two year contracts that auto renew and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew.
This is not the case anymore due to an EU law. It can only renew for 1 month at a time after the 24 months now.
Vote with your wallet and get one that's month-by-month. There are so many of these available by now.
Japan was like that with mobile contracts until about 5-10 years ago, when the government finally put an end to it.
> and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew
any examples?
Parship used to do this (not sure about their current practices, this was years ago): I once had a six-month subscription that would automatically extend by a year if you didn't cancel at least three months in advance (by letter or fax!). Especially dodgy in that line of business, because if you get lucky shortly before subscription runs out, you're literally giving away a year's worth of subscription that you're not going to use at all.
Many commercial leases run in 5-year increments with 2 5 year auto-renewals and a 90-180 day window in which to exercise the opt-out of auto-renewal. That window is often not set to end coincident with the end of the lease term for obvious reasons.
My favorite trick by various German service providers is impossibility to cancel. Like literally it's impossible. You cancel, you show deregistration from current address but they say "rejected, you can still use our service at the new address". Got fuck yourself and rot in hell.
I wonder if they'll accept registration forms foreign countries, e.g. of "Herr Muller is now a resident of Timbuktu"...
Or apparently it's possible to deregister moving to a foreign country with "address unknown", but I guess it'd have to be plausible when you claim "Oh I'm going to cycle around the world for 5 years"...
Speaking of experience from a friend that moved from Germany to another country and wanted to cancel his phone provider: No, this doesn't work, you can't cancel prematurely and you must pay the full amount. I think it was Congstar (subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom).
This make me so happy I moved out of Germany and reminds me to never ever come back.
“Deutsche Bahn, the fully state owned railway company, is a well liked company”.
Eh, nope. It’s a horribly mismanaged entity with permanent delays, bad service and outrageous pricing…
Sorry, I have a hard time holding back my sarcasm when writing while being annoyed, I thought the link to the 1.2 trust pilot rating gave it away.
As this was mostly written as anger management, the writing is pretty poor. :)
Don't worry, some of us got it. That part made me chuckle.
Yes, plus the rest of the article makes it clear this link was done in sarcasm.
All is clear; I enjoyed that bit :)
>I thought the link to the 1.2 trust pilot rating gave it away.
It did. Worry not.
It wasn’t you, the sarcasm was obvious.
Germans generally don’t understand sarcasm, written or spoken.
Most times the issue is that Germans do never break out from being sarcastic.
Poe's law
how can you not get this joke and sarcasm lol
I recall I was once on a Deutsche Bahn train, it was delayed more than an hour (not that I cared I wasn't in a rush). One worker came around handing out envelopes, since everyone was entitled to a partial refund, I had to sign it, and then mail it back to them? What the fuck? Not even Hitler would've allowed this
It's an automated process nowadays if you purchase your tickets via their app. (Which in turn acts as KYC and makes it impossible to travel anonymously.)
This was fixed just a couple of years ago. (Not the delays, but at least the refund process was streamlined.)
Does a worker now hand out envelopes filled with cash?
Now they are not allowed to accept the refund and you can only mail it to their bureaucracy.