Keep on movin’, don’t stop, no…
Travel apps promise to make travelling a breeze. They help but not as much as their creators think they do.
Travel apps are supposed to make travel easier. No more worry about paper maps, tickets and timetables — your smartphone can take care of everything.
A recent overseas trip has shown me that apps are changing how we get around but maybe not as much as they could.
The family and I have just returned from a visit to Barcelona (it was very enjoyable, thank you for asking). During the trip, I used three different apps to find our way around, and to take us there and back to home in London.
The apps were Citymapper, Trainline and EasyJet. Each one has a different purpose. Citymapper is an information service, mainly for impromptu journeys on public transport across a city. Trainline is, unsurprisingly, for planning and buying tickets for rail journeys. While Citymapper and Trainline are agnostic about service operators, the EasyJet app is solely for the airline’s flight bookings and add-on sales.
I use Citymapper every day and is one of the few apps on my phone that I consider to be essential. Trainline I use less often but it’s the one that I normally use when I’m travelling around the UK. The EasyJet app is on my phone only if I’ve booked a flight with them.
First off: Citymapper. This trip was the first time that I’d tried it in another city. The flip to another location was straightforward and it remained familiar enough to be useful. You don’t want to be learning how to use an app from scratch while huddled under an umbrella in an unknown street.
On the whole it worked well and we hit the ground running. The only major hiccup was going from our rented apartment in Dreta de l’Eixample to the Fundació Joan Miró. This would normally be a short but interesting journey. Take the metro from Tetuan to Paral·lel and then change to the funicular railway and get off at Montjuïc. Who doesn’t love a funicular railway?
Citymapper instead told us to exit Paral·lel and walk up a steep hill for 27 minutes. I contacted Citymapper the day before our planned visit to the Miró museum and queried the search results. They emailed back that the Montjuïc funicular was closed for annual maintenance and provided a link to the announcement on the operator’s website. A replacement bus service (something to make any Brit feel at home) could take us up the hill. Everything worked out fine and the museum was wonderful. But unlike in London, Citymapper hadn’t mentioned the suspended service or the replacement bus within the app.
I have my grumbles about Trainline. It works fine when travelling point-to-point but it can struggle with anything complex. Getting home from Gatwick was a good example. We could use the Gatwick Express to Victoria, Southern to London Bridge, or Thameslink on its separate routes to London Bridge or Blackfrairs. Tickets don’t transfer between each operator so a visitor unfamiliar with the intricacies of rail franchises could easily end up on the wrong service — especially when Thameslink sometimes use Southern rolling stock! Sitting in the arrivals hall, we tried to work out the right service home with Trainline but gave up after several attempts. Out of curiosity, I opened up Citymapper and found the right service almost immediately (this was a surprise as Citymapper usually works only on trips within a city).
EasyJet will tell you that its app is award-winning. It must be one of those awards that children get at birthday parties where everyone’s a winner. We’d checked-in through the website but this didn’t sync to the app which told us that we’d yet to do so. My wife is a stickler for having paper copies of everything when travelling, which turned out to be a right move. We were ready at the departure gate with our printed boarding passes while other passengers struggled to find the right screen on their smartphones.
This little trip showed me that apps have their uses but they have yet to truly revolutionise travel. You may consider a trip to be a series of connected journeys but the apps don’t. A single app is currently unable to cope with a combination of different modes of transport, and planned and impromptu journeys, whether they’re across a city or a continent, over a number of days. Itinerary apps (such as TripIt or WorldMate) try to compile sets of different bookings but have never worked well in my experience. (Others must feel the same: WorldMate is closing down in March.)
Tickets remain a major problem. They’re stuck in the 19th century. Yes, there are paperless boarding passes and contactless ticketing but their use remains limited. Most journeys rely on paper tickets and buying a combination of these when using different forms of transport for one journey. Each operator has its own way of doing things so trying to accommodate every feature and peculiarity is nigh on impossible. Trainline tries to sell tickets through its app but invariably these must be exchanged for paper ones at a station. To its credit, Citymapper doesn’t claim to be a ticketing platform but it seems strange that my phone can be smart enough to lay out a complex single journey but not get me through most ticket barriers.
Those who handle international standards have been busy in trying to create an ‘intelligent transport system’. On the International Organization for Standardization website, you can find reports on ‘public transport requirements for the use of payment applications for fare media’ (ISO/TR 14806:2013), ‘public transport user information’ (ISO 17185–1:2014) and ‘account-based ticketing standards requirements (ISO/DTR 20526). I suspect these standards are a low priority for most operators. Instead, local knowledge is needed to customise a universal interface which is the approach that Citymapper has taken.
I just want to travel from place to place. Apps have made the process easier but they’re imposed on fragmented and disjointed systems that exist for the convenience of the operators rather than travellers. One day it may be possible to move around and switch seamlessly between transport modes with confidence and ease. Like in music and publishing, I suspect that a service will have to emerge that forces operators to comply rather than expecting them to do it themselves.
