Deutsche Bahn has an amazing opportunity in ticket sales, but is too blinded by Flixtrain to seize it

While clearing old belongings here (pre-move to France) I stumbled across a 2003 Interrail diary of mine, and in it were timetables for trains in Italy and Romania printed out from the website of Deutsche Bahn. Today, 21 years on, I am still using Deutsche Bahn’s website to plan my Europe-wide railway trips. DB Navigator is the only railway planning app I have on the home screen of my phone*.

The reason is simple. DB has the best train planning and routing tool there is**, honed over years and years of experience, and many iterations.

Throughout my #CrossBorderRail projects taking me to every corner of the EU, Deutsche Bahn is the site I use to plan pretty much everything. Sure, data for a few countries is not in it (although this is not DB’s fault – these railways do not send their data to UIC), but for pretty much everything else DB gives me not only a route, but a pretty damned good route as well. And when you compare DB to the horrid online offerings from CP (Portugal), Renfe (Spain), SNCF (France) or HŽPP (Croatia) to name just a few, Deutsche Bahn is in a very good place indeed.

But the problem of course is when it comes to the next step: booking tickets.

I might find a route on Deutsche Bahn’s site, but – with a few exceptions – unless the trip starts, ends or transits Germany, I cannot book a ticket there.

Now imagine that as well as planning all trips I could book them as well. Imagine customers in Lisboa or Zagreb did not have to contend with their horrid national websites, but had the otherwise excellent DB experience to make their purchases?

So why, you are probably thinking, does Deutsche Bahn not think like this?

The answer is big and bright green: Flix.

Deutsche Bahn is more preoccupied about not having to sell tickets of private (semi-)rivals than it is to see an opportunity to transform its planning tool into a planning and purchasing tool for all of Europe. DB’s Alexander Mokros has stated pretty much as much regarding smaller private rival European Sleeper tickets on LinkedIn here.

From a passenger point of view this makes no sense.

I do not care who runs my train – be it a private or a state owned company. And I do not care who sells me the tickets – all I want is a fair and seamless planning and purchasing process. And as a campaigner and rail advocate I am often asked “where should I buy Europe-wide train tickets?” and as there is no clear answer to give people, I would really like this problem to be solved. Now finally some EU politicians are waking up to the problem as well.

Of course waiting in the wings are a whole bunch of private ticket sales companies ready to step up and fill this gap – Trainline, Omio and Rail Europe to name just a few. The problem at the moment is that the routing they offer is often poor compared to DB. But eventually these companies will sort that out.

So why then does DB not bite the bullet, and aggressively add ticket sales in more countries to its excellent planning tool? I’d use it, I’d tell everyone I know to use it, and given DB’s better route planning it’d be a winner. But at the moment DB is blinded by Flix and cannot see this opportunity.

* – yes, I know there are concerns about the data DB Navigator is hoovering up. That does not negate the fact that, in my view, it is still the best rail planner going. Please follow up your data concerns with DB, do not rant at me about it.
** – there are of course devotees of other sites, other apps, other tools. But most of them use UIC Merits as a data source, and have HAFAS in there somewhere. If you think some other app has a better planning tool than DB’s sure, be my guest – but then that one could develop into a genuine EU-wide rail planner. The approach of some other railways is likewise blinded by private rivals – for DB-Flix read ÖBB-Westbahn, Trenitalia-Italo and ČD-Regiojet-LeoExpress.