The geopolitics of travel experience — or how to apply deterrence CX to travel
This is Part 2 of my series about train travel and how you can think about it through a CX lens. Part 1 is here and it’s a bit more general. This piece is specifically about one aspect of CX which is comms and how that can be seen as potentially having a geopolitical layer if you were inclined to so-speculate, a shorter and more philosophical piece because it speaks to how language shapes reality and language choices shape our experience and politics. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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Quick reminder before we start: I cannot fly, I have a phobia. I spend hours on trains and cars and have started to treat them a bit like a side-project, tracking design changes, design choices and all the bits that make up the experience of being on a train/car. This series is about trains mainly though. I might do a follow up on cars soon.
Today let’s talk about how comms choices on trains seemingly tell you something about the politics of the countries you travel through. If you’ve read my Part 1 you’ll know about the importance of telling people travelling on your train stuff about the journey: where they are, where they’re going, how the trip is going, etc. Modern trains do that with async methods: screens, recordings, etc. The older trains do this with posters (the ultimate async, I hear you say) or with train conductor announcements. Of course modern comms improves the overall experience because they enhance basic needs: autonomy — you don’t need to wait with bated breath for when the conductor speaks, transparency — all the info is provided equally to everyone, and convenience — you can get the right info wherever you are in the train. The train conductor announcements OR posters do less of that because they tend to be occasional, sometimes delivered sub-optimally (human factor, you see) and they require you to be responsible for your own level of “information satiety”.
And there’s one more thing: the language being used for comms.
What language should train comms be in? National language, you will say! Sure, that makes sense. Most of your travellers will be people living IN the country the train travels through. BUT. But we live in the European Union and there are transnational trains plus you want to have tourists visiting your country. So, do you still pick just your national language or also include a lingua franca like English? Think about it: designing inclusive experience into a travel system is a fundamental concern and this is not just about physical accessibility, it is about linguistic and sensorial accessibility too. To make people feel safe, you need to keep them informed. And if they don’t read or speak your language, it is harder for them to feel that way.
Now, let’s compare what actually happens and understand how some of these choices possibly reflect national policies or, maybe, just human shortcomings. Most of the trains I travel on in Belgium have dual or trilingual comms: all announcements are made in French, English and Dutch. DB — Deutsche Bahn trains have bilingual screens — German and English, and multilingual train conductor announcements. Eurostar — a transnational train by definition, conducts comms in all the languages of the nations it travels through — so a Eurostar to Amsterdam from London will routinely communicate in English, French, Dutch. Signage is equally bilingual and all posters are in French and English (French company, English as lingua franca).
What does this mean? It means that as a traveller, I feel heard, seen and understood. And that I can, in turn, see, hear and understand which makes my experience better and significantly increases the probability of my wanting to return. Multilingual comms are fundamental to a good experience during travel but more than that they are a stimulus to loyalty and a feeling of belonging to a shared space.
Compare and contrast this to comms on trains in Hungary and Romania where comms is routinely ONLY in local language and most of the signage is only seldom multilingual. I don’t mean to single out Hungary in this one but it sadly suffers from one additional problem which is that its language — Hungarian, is also part of one of the least common languages in the world, so much so that it has its own category — the Finnoungric group consisting of Finnish and … Hungarian. This basically means unless you speak Finnish you will NOT understand anything you hear or see written in Hungarian. Nothing looks even remotely the same as it would, for instance, in Romania where if you’re Spanish/ Italian and Portuguese you will see “strada” written on a sign and understand that means the same as strada in Spanish, Portuguese or Italian — street/ road. I am sure these things are not unknown to operators in Hungary and Romania and yet, most of the trains I have been on have never had bilingual comms and when they do, quite often this is just to announce the next station which you already know from frantically self-navigating on your Google maps.
You will wonder by now why I have “politics” in my title. Well, while travelling back and forth from London this summer, and every other spring and autumn in the past 4–5 years I could not help but wonder whether this — the not adding info in other languages, is a political choice: our country, our language. Or, in other words, you don’t understand this, you don’t belong here. And is this, in a “united” place like Europe — a political statement maybe? Is this a way to apply what I called in a previous post “deterrence CX” — basically to make the experience prohibitive so people want to travel less? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just human shortsightedness and all they need is a bit of UCD (user-centred design).
I, for one, have found it hard to feel at ease in places where getting basic information was difficult. I also can recognize that I have only travelled through Hungary and Romania on a single route, so maybe there are trains there where everyone can understand what is being communicated and that makes their experience better. In the end, though, one needs to see that designing experiences is quite often more than just a brand statement. I like the Brand DB and the Brand OBB because they think of me when they make their trains. I also, somehow, feel that in the case of train travel — maybe because these are national operators, the choices made equate to political statements: we carry people from all nations and speak to all. For me, if brands ever wanted to become culturally relevant, this right there — speaking to Europeans in the languages of the EU, is a more striking way to achieve that than a lot of well-meaning advertising campaigns.
