alt Hacker NewsJapan's trains are great. Why is booking one so hard?
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My experience was arriving by train company X to a large station, having bought what I thought was the correct ticket to continue with company Y. On the platform for company Y's train, there was a small sign in English reminding foreigners they actually needed two 'tickets' to use the train (just as the article mentions) and I'd only bought one of them. There was a machine just the other side of the adjacent ticket barrier to buy the missing part.
Except the custodian of the ticket barrier would not let me pass through to use the machine, since I had not entered through this barrier. He looked at my tickets, and said that since I had entered on company X's train, I must go to platform 48 or whatever and use the barrier there. I was on platform 1.
This was an enormous station, and I missed the intended train.
Another journey involved 7 printed tickets for a one way journey with a couple of changes.
But instead of simplifying this, the Japanese have invented a complicated ticket barrier where you can stuff in all 7 tickets together, and it clips the relevant one(s) and returns them in the correct order.
I already ranted a bit about this in my conclusion of this blog post [1], but I'm happy to rant again here: it's beyond my comprehension why planning a train journey in Japan has to be this messed up. You first have to figure out the route (and Google Maps doesn't have all the operators there, so good luck), then you have to figure out how to buy the ticket for said route - which is an entire different system for each operator (e.g: JR East and JR West are completely different in their booking system) - even if you do it in person, each operator has its own machine and some tickets cannot be bought by credit card.
Then you have to deal with the consequences of Japan never modernizing (trying to use a credit card for the online reservation is painful, although things are improving a bit on this side). A few years back, less than 5, it was also impossible to reserve a train ticket using a foreign credit card (non Japan-issued Mastercard, with 3d-secure). I also had a very negative experience using a virtual credit card as you need a physical one to pick up your tickets...
I always want to laugh and cry at the same time when I read their domain name for booking the ticket (because of course their app is only available in the Japanese Play Store / App Store): https://e5489.jr-odekake.net/e5489/ibpc/CBTopMenuPC?LANG=en
Try any other variation of the above URL and you get... a 404.
Anyways, beside this, it's such a beautiful country. Can't wait to go back again.
[1]: https://blog.denv.it/posts/goodbye-travel-agents-hello-ai-ag...
I think it's cultural familiarity and resistance to change. My Japanese wife has no problem booking us tickets and it's been over 20 years since she left Japan -- the interface is probably the same as when she left Japan. People there are used to it and it's good enough for locals so no reason to change (even if it's more difficult for foreigners to use).
When I visited Japan with a friend in an area that's less touristy than other places, I had my wife book my bus/train tickets from the USA since the websites were so hard to navigate and it took a phone call to the bus company to book those tickets - she sent me a note to show at the ticket window to pick up the tickets.
Her mom complains when anything changes, it's been over 2 years since her favorite affinity card switched from in-person redemption to an online app and she still complains about the change.
I have a different opinion about this after visiting Japan for the first time this summer. I think they need to accommodate an aging population with technological advancements. It's a classic problem of making old systems work with new technologies. And this in itself is a great achievement if you look at it holistically. Yes, young(er) people can complain that is to hard to buy train tickets or have to interact over the phone for things that can be accomplished online, while old(er) people will probably have harder times adjusting to things like contactless payments, but in the end they managed to make the entire society, as a whole, function and move forward. It can be done better? Yes, definitely, but I think this is iterative and it will improve over time.
Buying tickets is a pain. You have to buy two tickets, and physically stack them together at the same time and feed into the machine at the gate.
Some trains and buses in remote areas only take cash. Some only take EXACT fare and the driver does not have change and will refuse you. I asked my hotel for exact fare by exchanging my foreign 10$ USD bill. The staff informed me it was illegal for them to exchange money. Lo and behold I looked it up and it is indeed illegal as you need a foreign exchange license.
Lived in Japan for 4 years:
- yes you need to speak and read Japanese
- a lot of sites embed the information inside of images, not text, which is not that easy to translate automatically and your AI agent probably won't think to check it unless you use screenshot navigation by default
- a lot of the booking will be done or expedited by phone calls
- yes you need a Japanese phone number
- yes you need a Japanese debit/credit card most of the time for online systems (or pay at the conbini, aka physical locations in Japan, American credits cards also work usually)
Or you could just show up and buy your ticket/pay your fare on the spot like 99% of the rest of Japan.
Think I’ve only ever had to buy a ticket online once before in all my years in Japan.
I think a fundamental issue is just that there are so many train companies. I don't think many (any?) other countries have quite so many, even JR isn't just one company. Even when individual companies put some effort into a renewal making things easier, when the experience starts from first finding out even which company to book from, there's a huge barrier to entry.
I think it is possible to define a booking standard so a meta provider could handle things, like trip.com etc for flights, maybe someday.
Japan is bad, but South Korea was the stuff of nightmares when I lived there with a Mac. So awful you had no choice but to laugh.
IE6, ActiveX controls, and mandatory keyloggers for online banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...
While I agree that online booking in japan can be difficult the frequency (especially between Tokyo and Osaka) allow you to book the same day easily. And especially first time going there limited express can be a bit daunting.
But once you get used to it; booking a ticket for shinkansen feel more alike buying a metro ticket than a airline ticket.
Booking online may well be difficult.
But having traveled around Japan extensively, I've had a very easy time buying train tickets in person, at the station. You can buy in advance if you want, but I've rarely had any need; just go, and buy a ticket for the next train.
So I guess I'm not too surprised to see that the website design is crappy: it's an afterthought.
The general problem is how to ensure quality in a low-competitive-pressure environment, especially public services which are natural monopolies. Quality only appears randomly if the right people happen to be in charge.
Look at what competition does in the AI model space. Imagine there was just OpenAI vs the actual case where there's Anthropic and others which pressure and copy each other.
I wonder if there's any solution to this, I couldn't think of any.
JR East is currently rolling out a new, streamlined booking portal. However, in classic Japanese style, attempting to access it from a non-Japanese IP returns a 403.
There was also news earlier this year that all the major JRs will introduce a unified booking portal in 2027, but I was unable to find any proof of life that this is actually happening.
As the joke says:
Japan in 1980 was 2000
Japan in 2000 was 2000
Japan in 2020 is 2000
Suica on an iPhone, job done? If it's shinkansen then use Smart Ex to load the ticket onto the card.
Japan has "Super Tickets" because it allows you to combine a shinkansen ticket with other rail journeys and use a single base ticket to connect between any two stations on the network, many with different infrastructure owners. It's very convenient once you grok it.
Often the Super is printed on the base ticket if you buy it together.
But maybe you use an IC card or virtual IC card and put the super ticket on it using the SmartEx app and reschedule or cancel with a few taps. Some people do that instead of whinging about inflexibility of legacy systems that still exist but no one uses.
Personally, I found a lot of systems to be a little behind regarding UX/CX in Japan.
Clearly once great and really ahead, but a little dated, by modern expectations.
i think the idea is you get a suica card and tap it at the station
"If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it"
I think Japan take this too far
A more puzzling aspect of it is, if you show up at a rural station near Akita, they'll sell you a multiple connection ticket to a rural station near Nagoya in seconds, using some hyperoptimized mainframe-terminal-style green-on-black text UI. A system that only requires you to know where you want to go does exist, maybe the problem is that every rail company has built their own version of such a system and there is an agreement to not compete online.
Apparently you need to use a Fax.
Whenever I need tickets it has been a smooth experience via ekinet[0].
Just entering a code later in a ticket machine was enough to get it printed.
> The most frustrating experience I had was booking a ticket online, only to get a message after confirmation: “You’ll need the physical credit card to retrieve your ticket at the station.”
Most (all?) airlines require this. In practice, it's only checked if your name differs from the name in the credit/debit card.
Other than that, the user fails to explain why booking a train is harder in Japan? They have multiple operators/lines but that's normal for a big/dense city like Tokyo.
I don't know for sure, but after living in Japan for 5 years now, whenever something in a Japanese business feels antiquated, inefficient, or just plain backwards and wrong, it's usually because some manager in an office who has been there longer than everyone else decided that it's good enough.
It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, but loyalty to the hierarchy goes deep here. I don't know how many times I've had to hold my tongue and not state a fact because if I did, the manager would "lose face". Not an insult, a criticism, or even an open question, just a fact-- if I know it's contrary to what a manager thinks is the right way, he gets to sit back and keep his ego puffed up for no good reason.
Once my manager asked me to aggregate a list in excel to find a final count for a range of parts used in our blueprints. I used a pivot table in Excel. It took me about two minutes. He snapped back, "How are you doing this so quickly? It must be wrong. Do it like this:" and he proceeded to take a screenshot of each page of the sheet, send the screenshots to chatGPT, and ask it to aggregate them. Dear god I wish I was joking. It took him over an hour and still left room open for human error (or AI error I guess). I showed him the pivot table method, he just scoffed and walked away.