Rail Enquiries, Rip-Offs and Belligerence

UPDATE: Since this post has been getting a trickle of hits every week since I wrote it back in April, here’s a little update.

Crosscountry Rail, one of the rail companies, have just launched their own iPhone app. It has a full journey planner, timetables, station arrivals and departures with platforms, local maps and everything else you might need. It’s also location-aware so you can find your nearest station.

It’s also completely FREE, thus proving that National Rail Enquiries are a bunch of monopoly-abusing rip-off merchants. Search in the iTunes App Store for Train Search.

As a pleasing aside, the Office of the Rail Regulator are looking into the many, many complaints about the NRE application, their legal threats to competitors and whether they abused their monopoly position.

Now, the original post….

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Dear National Rail Enquiries,

I think it’s absolutely disgusting that you’re charging £5 for your iPhone app, having shut down the competition.

The MyRail Lite app was fast and accurate and a joy to use, but most of all FREE. The information provided is free on your website, where I will get it in future (on my iPhone), why make us pay for a front-end to that same information.

Why are you ripping us off? I suppose as a UK rail company you simply have no concept of service – it really is all about money and profit and screw the long-suffering travelling public.

Thank you for your eMail.

We appreciate your concerns regarding the iphone My Rail Lite application. However, this application was never licensed to use our information. National Rail, in response to customer demand, has created an official application of its own.

If you prefer not to use the official application you can use a cut-down version of the Online Journey Planner on your phone at pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk

I hope this information is of use to you.

Regards,
Customer Services

Dear National Rail Enquiries

As a consumer, I don’t care about licensing. Kizoom may or may not have been authorised to so do: but what they did do is provide an excellent front end for your information. They did this for free. It matters not whether they were allowed to (they claim there were – and have obviously provided the service across many platforms for a long time.

Why, then are you charging £5 for a service someone else could do for nothing? Especially since it’s your data (well, our, the passengers, the citizen’s data – we paid for it with our tickets and through our taxes).

I appreciate there are development costs and perhaps I’d be inclined to pay 50p or £1 for the very, very simple application. However, there are costs for your website too, and that’s free. It’s the same data, Kizoom did it for nothing, therefore the only possible conclusion is that you are ripping off your passengers.

If you are so confident that your application is worth £5, why not give Kizoom the feed back and compete with them?

I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the cost of the National Rail Enquiries iPhone Application and the subsequent withdrawal of the MyRail Lite iPhone Application.

I can confirm that we did not withdraw the real time licence for MyRail Lite as the application was never licensed to use that data in the first place.

Although the MyRailLite application was not licensed to use National Rail Enquiries real time data, National Rail Enquiries did suggest an alternative solution to enable the product to continue but the developers refused.

National Rail Enquiries has not imposed a limitation on developing rail applications for iPhone. Timetable data is widely available and developers are free to use such data to develop applications if they wish having sought the relevant permissions from the industry data providers.

National Rail Enquiries provides a number of mobile web services including the iPhone application, which does have a one time £4.99 download fee.  Our other services include WAP (though iPhones do not support WAP) and our PDA site at pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk, which are free to use.

The cost of the iPhone Application is not for the data but development and support costs. The data is offered to users of the application for free and the same data can be accessed through other channels such as the website.

Regards,

Customer Services

Dear National Rail Enquiries,

As I’ve said, the point isn’t that it was or wasn’t licensed. The point is that someone else did it for free. You’re charging a fiver.

That makes your product a rip-off.

I am sorry you are still unhappy regarding the cost of our iphone application.

We are always grateful for customer feedback and suggestions. Unfortunately we are not always able to respond to individual comments but thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

Be assured we will pass on the details of your eMail to our Management Team, who review all comments, in order to improve the level of service we offer to our customers.

Once again, we thank you for your eMail.

I think that means the conversation is over…