Eurail: Delaying important information

Visitors are not told they may be making a wasted journey.

The Site

Eurail, a consortium of European train operators, invites frustration by not being up front about restricted eligibility for its services.

Eurail’s home page is a noticeboard of banners and sets of links promoting its travel products and pushing the ‘buy now’ option. Buy now involves a minimum of three steps to arrive at the online payment process, which starts by asking users to select a country of residence from a dropdown list. This is tailored to exclude countries from Europe and is the first indication that citizens of European countries are ineligible for Eurail tickets.

There is no mention of the exclusion clause on the site’s home page nor on the introductory index page for Our products. Users need to visit the About us page for an unambiguous indication (“Eurail offers Rail Passes to non-European residents…”) or the FAQs, where they need to scroll down to the seventeenth question on the unindexed list.

The Takeaway

Eurail can, perhaps, afford in the immediate term to let European visitors to its site discover in their own time that its services are exclusively for visitors to Europe and not for them. It wasn’t, after all, ever expecting to sell anything to them. In general, though, it makes sense commercially and as relationship management to control customer expectations in order that visitors don’t leave your site nursing a sense of disappointment or frustration.

In Eurail’s case it would be a simple matter to add a ‘Who can use our passes’ box to its home page mix and product overview pages. Who knows, that might even encourage European visitors to suggest to their non-European friends or colleagues that they check out the site.

First published on 06 December, 2007