What’s Swedish for “The Ticket Office is closed?”
Today marks a milestone. A major European railway is completing the closure of all ticket offices.
The booking offices at Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö will not open, with the closure programme having been brought forward by Covid. Spokesman Tobbe Lundell said:
It has hit SJ’s finances hard and we are now eliminating an unnecessary cost in order to continue to be able to offer an attractive price level on our trips
Compare that to the UK. I just chose a station at random and had a look at what ticket office opening hours are currently being advertised:
Who on earth is currently buying tickets at Arundel station? For 13 hours!
The railway is about to be hit by its biggest financial crisis of modern times (for a clear evocation of what that is going to feel like, take a listen to my podcast guest Simon Calder), and yet the railway is paying people to sit and do nothing.
Maybe the railway is deliberately supporting jobs until full-employment returns? That’s a decent idea given that it’s hardly the place of the Government to add to unemployment. But given that the railway needs to rebuild demand from (virtually) zero, surely everyone on the payroll should be doing the most productive role possible. Sitting for 13 hours behind glass in Arundel hardly qualifies.
Even if there was no desire to reduce cost at all, redeploying staff improves service and increases revenue. Which is going to be needed!
Swedish Railway has been working on this closure programme for most of the last 10 years. Yet it has one of the most improved customer satisfaction ratings for ticket office purchase in Europe
In cities like Karlstad, local entrepreneurs with better local connections have stepped in to run the old ticket office as a private business. In most places, customers have moved to different technologies.
At Chiltern Railways, when we built the new Oxford line, we had the luxury of being able to design stations from scratch. We didn’t include ticket offices. This wasn’t a cost-saving measure; we employed staff at the stations. But they were out with the people they served; assisting with the ticket machines, providing help and being a friendly and welcoming face.
It clearly worked: looking at the last pre-Covid National Passenger Survey, satisfaction with stations on the Chiltern Railways Oxford route was 90%: joint highest in the UK after only the LNER Scottish route (91%).
This is unsurprising: in 2019, Transport Focus researched customers’ attitudes to ticketing. They found that customers:
felt that the rail industry is lagging behind other sectors in adopting new payment technologies. They look at Apple, PayPal and Amazon as setting the pace and at Transport for London, with Oyster and contactless payments, as leaders in terms of early adoption for land transport in the UK
As a reminder, neither TfL nor Amazon have ticket offices.
So, customers want change, the industry finances desperately need change and we’ve just been through a trigger for change so earth-shattering that virtually no sector is coming out of it untouched.
Which of these stations needs a booking office?
So why will Arundel station (annual use 0.3 million) ticket office open tomorrow at 07.45 when Stockolm’s (annual use 100 million) will not?
Well, it’s all down to incentives. For more on THAT, read here.
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