DB Travel Centres

[peter166]

DB seems to have a very different policy around Travel centres and ticket offices compared to the UK ....investing in them rather than closing them.

DB opens first of 25 redesigned station travel centres

GERMANY: Deutsche Bahn has opened the first of 25 redesigned station travel centres at Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof. Features include a larger reception area with staff who can deal quickly with minor queries, a more inviting waiting area, and information on approximate waiting times, with the option...

www.railwaygazette.com

 

[peterblue]

Having an area for staff to deal with 'minor' queries is a good idea - fewer people in the queue for more complex questions.

 

[gordonthemoron]

I used Binz station in July, they’d replaced the ticket office with a video machine

 

[paul_munich]

They look great, it is the same design we will see with the refurbishment of the ICE fleet, starting from autumn this year!

 

[U-Bahnfreund]

There are far far fewer ticket offices in Germany than in the UK. As of 2021, there are 360 DB Reisezentren plus a handful of non-DB ticket offices (plus some 74 video ticket offices where there's no actual human present). And they keep closing them, like for example the ones in Oberhausen and Recklinghausen which are due in December (source).

This is partly because people keep switching to buying tickets on the apps (of course sort of a vicious circle: if there are less ticket offices, people at less likely to use them), and partly because they used to cross-subsidise Reisezentren through selling local transport tickets. But in many areas, such as in the VRR region, ticket selling has been tendered out and DB lost the contract, so they can only sell longer-distance tickets now, which isn't commercially viable enough.

In some stations, book shops have taken over local transport ticket selling as a consequence, but from my experience the people there have no idea what they are doing. Not really a comparable service.

Investing in a few of the most used ones doesn't make up for the closed rest.

 

[duesselmartin]

DB seems to have a very different policy around Travel centres and ticket offices compared to the UK ....investing in them rather than closing them.

DB opens first of 25 redesigned station travel centres

GERMANY: Deutsche Bahn has opened the first of 25 redesigned station travel centres at Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof. Features include a larger reception area with staff who can deal quickly with minor queries, a more inviting waiting area, and information on approximate waiting times, with the option...

www.railwaygazette.com

We had mass closures a few years ago. Only major cities kept them. In some smaller cities agencies take over.
Oberhausen, a city with more than 200 000 people is about to loose its ticket office.