Digital convenience? Really?

Twenty years ago, fresh out of university, my mate David and I travelled the Trans-Siberian railroad.

We arrived in Moscow in late August, armed with little more than our backpacks and a softcover guidebook. The Internet was still a very new thing for consumers in 2002, and we had reserved nothing. Not even our first night’s accommodation.

But this was OK. This was, in fact, not unusual behaviour for the time. Following the directions to the cheapest hotel listed in our Lonely Planet, we found beds just fine. Then, after a couple of days exploring the Russian capital, the time came to buy our train tickets for the exotic lands many miles to the east.

And do you know how we did that? We went up to a window at a ticket desk at Yaroslavl Station. We’d pre-written our wishes in Cyrillic script. Then, with nods and apologetic we-don’t-speak-Russian smiles, we gave the slip of paper to some frowning toad of a civil servant behind the counter. She did stuff on a computer, wrote down the price and we handed over the necessary Roubles. We then received a bit of paper in return.

Job done.

Convenience and ease

Fast forward to the summer of 2022. Our plans for a nostalgic reprise of that journey – one that was supposed to lead to a book about how ourselves, Russia and the very art of travel had changed – have been knocked on the head by Vladimir Putin’s ongoing blood campaign. The whole thing has been reduced to a brief journey from Budapest to Cluj-Napoca in Romania.

Though I now live much closer to Budapest than he does, the job of booking advance tickets – standard procedure in today’s world – fell to David. Yes, he was sitting at home in Cape Town, but that would hardly matter. He only had to jump on the Hungarian Railways website with a credit card to hand, figure out which was the cheapest train, and we’d have our reservations.

“We have to print them out,” I warned. “Because I’ve learned the hard way that smart mobile tickets aren’t so smart when your battery runs out or the on-board WiFi connection you were counting on isn’t available.”

Now a volley of messages ensued. What was my date of birth again? Apparently, the Hungarians needed this information to book an adult ticket. Then it emerged that the website refused to accept the 22nd of May as a valid data entry.

“I’ve put in May 1st,” David reported glumly. “Hoping it won’t matter. No idea why they insist on this information.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Fine. You got the tickets by email? Forward it on and I’ll get ’em printed.”

Shortly thereafter, a long, convoluted stream of text, entirely in Hungarian and littered with links, landed in my inbox. The innocent African had evidently been fool enough to assume common sense had broken out and this email actually represented a ticket. But it looked suspicious to me. I knew the sly ways of our much-changed world.

Sure enough, when I whacked a few salient sections into Google Translate, my fears were confirmed. It was a trick I knew from my home in Austria: they send you an email, and you then have to navigate hoops to try and download an actual PDF ticket. A thing with a QR code on it.

“It’s not a ticket,” I explained wearily. “You have to get hold of the PDF. You have to click on one of those links, or log back into the account to get them. You made an account, right?”

“Yeah, they forced me to do that, obviously. But I gave them money! Why can’t they just send an actual ticket?”

“Welcome to the world of European digital convenience,” I replied, sounding even sourer than this looks on your screen. “The links just keep on taking me in a circle, mostly in Hungarian. See what you can do if you’re logged in.”

A few hours later, David reported that logging in hadn’t helped. He was stuck in a loop too. No matter where he clicked, he couldn’t get anywhere near the actual tickets we’d bought.

“Very well,” I sighed. “I bet you this is going to work in the mobile app. Because squinting at a tiny screen is what it’s all about these days, I hear. Send me your logins, and I’ll see what happens. And failing that, I’m cycling to the nearest station in Hungary and waving that email at somebody until they give me a ticket. It’ll only be a day’s work if it comes to that.”

Sighing and eye-rolling with feeling, I downloaded the MAV (Hungarian Railways) app onto my mobile phone. I logged in, which took several minutes thanks to the laborious password David had created for all accounts due to his Facebook having been hacked a week or two before.

Finally – and thank the merry Pope for this – I was able to find the tickets in the app. Only after I located and Google-translated the Hungarian word for ‘language’, mind you. (It’s nyelv, if you’re wondering. One of the shortest words they’ve got, it would appear.)

“Good, now I’ll just click on ‘download’ so that I’ve got them available offline and for printing,” I said to myself.

But there was no download option.

“Fine, have it your way,” I thought. “I’ll simply take a screenshot. The conductor can still scan the QR code with that.”

Oh, fool that I am! You couldn’t take screenshots. Someone at MAV, whose full-time job appeared to be finding ways to make my life difficult, had troubled to include a software tweak barring the app from allowing such workarounds.

I updated David: “Well, I’ve located the actual tickets. But I can’t print them or get them off the app in any way, shape or form. So I’m going to have to switch on mobile data roaming, which is going to cost us some glorious and surprising amount. And I’ll need to keep nursing that old phone of mine in the steaming summer heat of Budapest. I bet it’ll crash on the day we travel.”

“Grief, that’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, smooth, huh? I’ve spent at least an hour Google-translating, downloading apps and sending you messages. You’ve been hacking about on the laptop for ages too. All to get a single bloody train ticket. And still people roll their eyes and call me a Luddite when I say technology ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“I say we just go to the ticket counter next time. Let that angry Russian do the computer stuff and put a ticket in our hands.”

And then we ranted about the many ways in which travelling in 2002 was actually easier than it is in the age of smartphones and digital bookings.

Ticket counters

But we won’t line up at the ticket desk next time, will we? We’ll keep on battling the apps and jumping through whatever hoops they come up with next.

Why? Because we’re not made of money. And failing to book in advance now comes with the distinct threat of paying a premium when you rock up at the station in the hours or days before you travel.

This is the twisted kicker in this whole business. I would love to travel as spontaneously as we did twenty years back. I want to let the lady at the booking office – or even a ticket machine, if she’s been fired in the latest round of automation – handle printing our tickets. But doing this on my usual shoestring is unthinkable.

And, inevitably, we have the consumer-friendly marvels of digital connectivity to thank for this. In 2002, prices were mostly still set. It didn’t matter if you rocked up mere moments before departure: there was only one price per class and destination. Companies that sold tickets didn’t have access to dynamic, real-time pricing algorithms that could scream ‘only 3 seats left at this price’ at you regardless of the truth, so they just had to fix a price and let everyone get on with their lives.

But now, unless you’re one of the lucky few for whom money is no object, you have to book everything in advance. And it’s not just the irritation, passwords, wasted hours and forced ownership of mobile devices and expensive roaming data that I resent. It’s the way it has killed off spontaneity in travel for so many of us. It’s the reason people in backpacker hostel lounges are spending their evenings on tablets, booking the next place, as opposed to actually living that evening.

And worst of all, they sell this way of doing things as convenient, easy and desirable. Digital natives may lap that up. They know no other world, the poor dears. But I’m old enough to know that we’re being mugged off. And that, it would seem, makes me unhappy enough to write 1487 words on the subject.