In support forums people naturally only share negative experiences because making a post to say “things worked out more or less as I expected them” is weird.
It does seem though that some people do not correct for that negativity bias, so I’ll just share today’s experience that left me thinking “boy, Deutsche Bahn definitely has a room to improve on this area but even if their processes are inefficient, they did offer us the solution we wanted!!11elf”
Me, a friend and a dog have a trip abroad coming up, and we have booked our two-way tickets through bahn.de but with paper tickets (because dog tickets were not normally available as eTickets when we first booked).
Very recently the situation changed so that we had to return to Germany on different dates and so we wanted to modify the booking so that one of the return Sparpreis fares and reservation are cancelled and refunded.
The bahn.de website would only allow us to cancel the entire journey (all individuals, both directions). That was somewhat inconvenient but taking a trip to the Central Station was also an opportunity to go out of the house a bit anyway.
At the Travel Centre, the worker initially told us that our request is possible, but then she noticed that the system wouldn’t let her made the modification to the booking. At that point, after consulting with her more qualified co-workers, she let us know that we cannot modify the booking in such a targeted way because our booking through bahn.de was done through a different DB subsidiary than the subsidiary they work for. That is ridiculous.
The two workers then told us that what they can do for us is cancel the entire return leg of the journey (for all three) and they will post a refund request to the other subsidiary on our behalf. Then, we can on the spot re-book our new return tickets on our new desired dates. That works for us, but we did remark that someone without the financial buffer to wait for the refund while also buying new tickets would be under a lot of stress at that point.
During the rebooking process we did feel a bit left out of the loop because we expected that now we would be paying last-minute Flexpreis fares and there was a financial boundary we didn’t want to cross, but at the end of the process we were offered Flexpreis fares at the price of our original Sparpreis tickets, so we did not suffer any financial consequences (although we expect that the refund will be reduced by 10 EUR for the administrative fee as the terms and conditions for Sparpreis tickets clearly mention). It appears that the Travel Centre had access to a contingent of cheaper Flexpreis tickets that aren’t available on bahn.de - perhaps exactly for situations like ours.
The two workers were extremely patient with all our questions during the whole process since we wanted to get every detail correct during the destructive operation of cancelling the tickets and above all make sure that the dog doesn’t end up “having” to take a different train if we couldn’t rebook on the original connection. The main worker helping us even thanked us for our attention to details, because --I think-- she almost did make a mistake at one point during the rebooking but we caught it early (she didn’t outright admit it though).
So, what’s this pointless non-rant about? I guess it’s that DB’s corporate structure and processes are unnecessarily complicated and the people who are trying to help you have to jump through a lot of hoops to offer you the solution that they also recognise you should get.
We were lucky to come across two workers that took all the time necessary to get us to where we needed to be at the end and do so without directing their frustration at the utterly broken process towards us for asking them to carry out. Honestly, I don’t think we’d have the patience for this if it was our job.
We still think that at every step of this non-ordeal, DB Corporate could have made very simple business decisions that could cut the effort required down.
And I still think that it’s just weird to make posts to say how things are “mostly okay, but could be better”.
It’s truly a thankless job, and the worse part is that as a customer-facing employee you can see how things are broken, but you have little to no authority or the technical means to deviate from Policy™, especially when your work performance is not measured in “problems solved” and “customers leaving satisfied”, but rather “requests closed per hour”.
That’s why we were so pleasantly surprised that those people too so much time to offer a solution, when they are structurally incentivised to say “nothing to do with us, take it up with the subsidiary who sold you the ticket in the first place and make it their problem”.
Which I guess kind of defeats my thesis that is weird to talk about things going right. Successful problem-solving should be part of the incentive loop for those jobs somehow.