Dark Patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
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The article exposes Deutsche Bahn's dark patterns in their BahnCard subscription process, sparking a heated discussion among HN users about the company's practices and the broader issue of predatory subscription plans in Germany.
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Eh, nope. It’s a horribly mismanaged entity with permanent delays, bad service and outrageous pricing…
As this was mostly written as anger management, the writing is pretty poor. :)
Germans generally don’t understand sarcasm, written or spoken.
It did. Worry not.
This model of kind-of privatization is used in Germany in a few areas and it's god awful for everyone involved, like with the hospitals.
I don't like falling politics especially here on HN but I cannot for the life of me understand why this model is still being defended by some people.
What I think is that a system which has as its goal extracting profit for investors doesn't work for public services which do not respond properly to market forces.
Natural monopolies, services in which profit is extracted at the cost of benefit, and inelastic services which are bound to wellbeing are some examples.
My credit card provider was considerably more helpful when I solved the problem with a chargeback.
Sure, they'll be in trouble perhaps when going against the computer, but then if no one can go against the computer, why bother with humans?
To be clear: I prefer the humans. But self-thinking ones.
I know of instances where the end result of a more than half a year support escalation process of the highest instance said "you (the customer) did everything correctly, but our support provided wrong advice. Bad luck though, as we don't consider ourselves accountable for mistakes in the support process. Please stop contacting us."
> Sie [DB AG] befindet sich zu 100 Prozent im Eigentum des Bundes
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Standardar...
Typically, on the way, there is also a separation between the "good piece" and the "bad piece" of the company, ie the company that operates the trains (and makes profit out of the passengers etc) and the one that maintains the infrastructure. The state then can sell the profit-generating part of the company to the private sector, and continue operating the non-profitable one itself, so the private capital can enjoy the best of both worlds (having a privatised train company, but still having the state eat up the economic burden of maintaining the infrastructure that the former operates on). Not sure where germany stands in this roadmap, but this is what has happened in other places (and no it did not improve the experience of passengers to any degree).
Why they went with an AG in 1993, I don't know.
The issue is one of legal status. In most countries you can be a commercial company or essentially a branch of the government (leaving aside coops and charities).
So in general you have companies (legal status) but they are fully owned by the state, hence "state-owned company". "Privatized" means the government decided to sell most or all the shares to the public.
Counter example is the USPS in the US, which is an agency of the Federal government.
Maybe this is a language barrier issue. Companies organized as AG, GmbH etc. under private law, in opposition to branches of the government or special institutions of public law. This is commonly called "Bahnprivatisierung" in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn was "privatized" in the sense that it was moved from public law to private law based organization.
It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.
This company structure was the result of the neoliberal thinking of having as much free market as possible, with the beneficial side effect of creating many highly payed board chairs for former politicians.
Today, the problems, mainly caused by cutting cost on maintenance, are so close to the surface, that even the most head-in-the-cloud establishment politicians cant spin it anymore, so the new DB ceo (Palla), tasked with "fixing it", came up with a long term plan. For decades, from every side, DB/german governments was critized for not having an articulated goal of the minimum public service that should be provided. The german governments were not directing, so 100% state _owned_ is technically true but obscures the complexity. The former ceo Mehdorn, that started this down trend did exatcly what any short-term-gain ceo would do and is, despite this blatantly failing infrastructure, still well regarded.
Today, one primary goal of this plan to fix it all, is to "reduce delays". Cuting schedules and lines will make this number up too! And so the next round of ceo bonus payments are secured and the shit show continues.
What else could you expect? A solution to fix vital infrastructure and strengthen trust in politicians and governments to cost money?! Haha.
Citation needed.
I did get a debt collectors post about my unpaid bill and I had to send around emails to them as well that I was pardoned and I didn't use the card at all. I don't remember if I got a confirmation about it and that's why I still have it on my records. After like 7 (8?) years, who knows when they would go under and then come up to me that I owe them like half a million in unpaid debt.
What is wrong is that this behaviour is being perpetrated by an organisation that one would not expect to see it.
Edit: Every 500 euros count…
“ Today is about dark patterns that cost me 500€ for nothing.”
However, if I try to explain to them I cannot purchase tickets costing less than 4€ for reasons I simply keep to myself like they do, they hit me with a 60€ fee.
Regulation (EU) 2021/782
> Railway undertakings may introduce a minimum threshold under which payments for compensation will not be paid. This threshold shall not exceed EUR 4 per ticket.
Sadly the MEPs cared more about railway companies than passengers.
Mobile phone contracts, internet service contracts principally among them. Two year contracts that auto renew and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew.
any examples?
This is not the case anymore due to an EU law. It can only renew for 1 month at a time after the 24 months now.
As time was running up, I was reminded to renew the membership.
If I didn't, the membership would get cancelled.
If I did, the membership would turn on auto-renewal.
So they auto-renew memberships once you've paid twice.
This ensures that people who get auto-renewed but forgot about it at least liked renewing once.
Auto-renewal of subscriptions supposed to be a feature for veterans of a service, and not something to cheat people out of their money after they never get a good return of investment the first time.
Just to give Kagi some credit here: They have a friendly reminder every month that my subscription is about to renew. Every month I'm given the chance to cancel, and every month I'm reminded of what a decent service that is. It surely does mean they'll lose some customers. But it also means that those who stay, stay forever.
Or apparently it's possible to deregister moving to a foreign country with "address unknown", but I guess it'd have to be plausible when you claim "Oh I'm going to cycle around the world for 5 years"...
Did I get compensation? Yes I did after four months for the ticket price only (around 40 euros), but after ridiculous process of that I need to send them forms and tickets via regular post, with a stamp that can only post within Germany. Nice try by their side..
DB is far from perfect and the backlog in rail and rolling stock maintenance seems to drag them down more and more but they are a godsend when it comes to booking and managing international train travel. It is both far easier and generally far less expensive to book an international trip through DB than it is through e.g. the Dutch, Danish or Swedish railway operators or one of the middle-man sites like omio.se etc.
Iirc they only started this possibility in june 2021. So anyone, especially foreigners, that experiences this system before then, will still know the paper only version. And 2021 is quite late to implement a digital version of that.
It's all around scams and it's utterly embarrassing that 210k people are actually employed in Germany for this. There are people who get payed for implementing dark patterns as a government service to get a little bit more money.
There are a few that let you cancel before the last day of the month, and even let you add the ticket to Apple/Google Wallet so you don't need to depend on some mediocre app having a good enough day to display your ticket during an inspection.
Very confusing, the irony/sarcasm of the second part is not clear: yes it is 100% owned but 1.2 is a really bad score, Germans hate DB. That sentence if even more confusing for a German, because in Germany 1 is a good score and 5 is a fail (at school at least).
The only people who thing db are good are idiotic Brits who go “privatisation is bad we should run our railway like Germany with twice the subsidise and half the reliability”.
Not exactly how we think. We're frustrated that our private railway is worse than DB in terms of lateness and cancellations but also hugely, massively more expensive for us to use.
We'd be happy if it was publicly owned because then at least the insane profit from ticket sales might possibly just maybe make it into investment in the railway instead of someone's bonus.
And your laughable claim about British railways being later than DB, shows that yes, you are an idiot Brit.
Of course it’s been moot for 5 years since Boris started the nationalisation at scale during Covid, simply moving to a standard outsourced operation.
Half a month ago I see someone on Twitter defending its own product design as "transparent and nothing hidden" - the "$0 now, then $15/month in 14 days" description where all text after "$0" are small and in grey. I don't think it maintains trust between the product and users, and thus it doesn't seem like a good thing.
That's the response I got on from quite a few people on german speeaking reddit, also calling me an idiot :)
It's, like, when the designs are made in a perpetual bureaucratic Kafkaesque then the results are like this. They're only building to specification, there is no UX research.
You're not going to not take the train. Not like the ticket experience is going to make a big difference with another train provider.
I would be more willing to buy that, if their support response would be different, and if it hadn't been an issue for years, including fighting legal battles to keep conditions close to what they are now.
One has to assume they are fully aware and unwilling to improve.
Both can be true at the same time.
Ticket sales are generally quite straight forward with DB online and the area tickets are usually a good value compared to local tickets.
[2] seems to be offering the same, but I haven't tried it myself. [3] looks interesting too.
[1] https://www.ticket-plus.app/en/
[2] https://www.mopla.solutions/de/tickets/deutschlandticket
[3] https://deutschland-ticket.store/autobus-oberbayern?lang=en
My understanding is that the Bavarian day ticket can still be purchased as a piece of paper from a kiosk at the station and we would print our names on it (2 adults, 3 kids). This seems so much easier than worrying about starting and stopping a subscription!
https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/regional/regional-day-ticket-b...
Presumably in response to this, some services now show a very ambiguous warning when canceling, leaving it open whether the cancellation will become effective immediately or at the end of the first subscription period.
Subscription management really ought to be taken away from the companies providing the service to the payment method (not that that's ever going to realistically happen without legislation though, due to the incentives).
https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2022/02...
At least that's what I got from the summary here:
https://www.test.de/Deutsche-Bahn-Kunden-koennen-Bahncard-la...
[1] https://www.rv.hessenrecht.hessen.de/bshe/document/LARE25000...
On the third year, the contracts become monthly contracts. However, if you do any change in the contract, it starts again. For example, if you have internet for 5 years, and request a speed change, it starts again to count the 2 years.
Absolutely crazy from my non-german point of view. In my home country the first year is a full year, and it becomes monthly cancelable afterwards for things like internet, where they subsidize the installation and the modem. But in Germany, I was charged 120 dollars for the installation, and had to pay for the modem.
I was like... alright, no sense in arguing with them anymore.
And why did I cancel the subscription anyway? Because the trip that I planned (Hamburg to Paris) and that was listed as buyable was of course everything but buyable. Always failed at the last step of ordering with some indistinct error message. Well, they really did not want my money, that much I can say.
The phrase "up to four weeks before the end of the term" is misleading and can be reasonably interpreted different ways. Let's say you buy a ticket today (October 10, 2025) and it renews October 11, 2026 (one year later). Four weeks before the end of the term would be September 13, 2026 (i.e. October 11, 2026 - 4 weeks).
Since we just established that "four weeks before the end of the term" is September 13, 2026, then "Termination is only possible up to four weeks before the end of the term" can be interpreted to mean "Termination is only possible up to September 13, 2026" which means I should be able to terminate any time between now and September 13, 2026, i.e. I have a max of 11 months after date of purchase to terminate the auto-renew.
Alternatively, Wender's credits, for the American Friend was the procuring of a series of gaffers to film the long-shot of Hamburg.
[1]:https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nat...
…
Thank you for reminding me to cancel my bahn card.
(I checked, they never took the price of the ticket from my account initally, why not is bizzare)
Happened to me as well; I had a 'youth' card for people below the age of 27, even remembered that some cards auto-renew and checked online to see if mine would, because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't just get upgraded to the regular and much more expensive BahnCard... couldn't find a renewal date and thought I'd be fine. But apparently I didn't check thoroughly enough, and only got informed of now having 200€ less and a shiny new BahnCard by email. Also emailed support, also didn't get anywhere.
Later I mention this to a friend... and he says 'ah, yeah, same with me'.
A mix of various forms of customer hostility and stupidity (from not providing data about some transit connection to Google Maps to an insanely convoluted ticketing scheme to inflexible fare rules if you don't want to pay insane amounts) resulted in me taking a car for a trip that could and otherwise would have been done by public transit.
I hate driving (why would I spend an hour doing work/paying attention when I could read a book), and would still consider doing it again for that connection just to avoid dealing with the bullshit.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland one ticket mostly gets you from A to B, even if that involves a boat, a tram, a train, and a bus. Oh, and they'll be on time too.
They also do not really suffer any financial damage. They do not have competition and no matter how badly run their business is, their losses are paid for by the tax payer.
I got a BahnCard 25 for 3 months, and one month before it expired, it automatically renewed for a full year. Even though I canceled it, I still had to pay for the entire year.
I bought a train ticket to Austria, and they announced strikes just five days before my trip. They didn’t refund my money directly. I had to fill out a form in person at DB, and I only got 80% of the money back.
The trains are unreliable; they are often delayed.