having just booked and printed my online tickets with Deutsche Bahn for the trip to erlangen this weekend, i decided to hop over to the SBB website and try their new online ticket system as well for the schaffhausen–adliswil part…aside from two failed attempts at getting the ticket price displayed (both just waited for a reply from the sbb server), i get as far as the payment step: before i can do that i need to acknowledge that i’ve read the SBB online ticket terms & conditions:
i cannot cancel online tickets, ouch — the Deutsche Bahn (DB) variant allows me to do that
i can only travel on the day that is printed on the online ticket — considerably less customer friendly than with tickets i buy at the counter, and, again, the Deutsche Bahn system doesn’t make a difference between online tickets or normal tickets here
i have to print the ticket on white paper with a minimum resultion of 600dpi, no smeared print, no incomplete prints! (gosh, this starts to sound like a persiflage of german bureaucracy, except it’s not, it’s swiss!) it sounds like i’d be printing stock certificates…
all in all, much less costumer friendly than what is possible (see Deutsche Bahn’s system that has been in operation for quite some time now) and too restrictive for my taste — i cancel the ticket purchase.
why can’t they just use the same system as Deutsche Bahn? smells suspiciously like “not-invented-here”…
oh, and there are conditions under which a ticket might be canceled or returned: if i die before the train journey, i can file a form (available from the SBB web site) in writing with the SBB contract center in brig — either they have the inside dope on facilities available after death (via the vatican swiss guard connection? eternal flat rate? and you’ll probably not care about how much bandwidth you’ll get: you’ve got all eternity to get that download done) or they are begging to be haunted by the ghosts of online ticket travellers…
p.s.: coming to think of it, some internet service provider provide heavenly download rates already in the here & now…
