The traveller's post-purchase reality, from trust to a time-consuming recovery.
Deutsche Bahn runs around a thousand long distance services a day. In the first half of 2026, 58.7% of them arrived on time, which means somewhere north of four hundred trains a day are arriving late. And a train is officially punctual if it is less than six minutes behind. Five minutes is plenty to miss the train you are supposed to be getting onto next.
None of that is Deutsche Bahn's failure to fix in this piece. Trains run late everywhere. What interests me is the ninety seconds that follow, and who is supposed to be there for them.
Munich Hauptbahnhof, platform 14.
A traveller is watching the departure board. Their ICE arrived sixty minutes late. The onward train left at 13:18.
The missed connection: the inbound ICE is 60 minutes late and the 13:18 onward has gone; a covered alternative exists.
They open the app they booked with. Not Deutsche Bahn, who ran the train, but the platform that sold them all three legs, took the payment and sent the confirmation. And standing there, they find they cannot describe what has happened to them. They do not know the phrase is missed connection. They do not know that everything about what comes next depends on a fare condition they have never read. So they type the only four words they have.
my train is gone
The chatbot the traveller actually meets. It asks them to pick what they mean, then hands back four generic instructions while their train pulls out.
Reference: OmioThe assistant asks them to pick which of three things they mean. Did the booking disappear, was the train cancelled, or did they miss it.
They try again, more carefully this time, and get an answer. Check your booking status. Look up whether your fare allows changes. Speak to station staff. Keep your receipts in case you need them later.
Four instructions, handed to someone with no time, no information and no patience left.
And underneath it, a thumbs up and a thumbs down, inviting them to rate the experience while their train pulls out.
That is the part that stings. They spent ninety seconds of the few they had, typed twice, read a wall of bullets, and ended up further from an answer than when they started. The effort went one way and nothing came back. Every round trip costs them time, and the one thing they do not have is time.
It would be easy to call this a bad chatbot, and it is not.
It is fast, fluent and well built, and every travel platform shipped one this year. Ask it to compare Berlin to Prague at eleven at night from your sofa and it is genuinely excellent. It was simply built for a different person. It was built for the one who is choosing, and nobody built anything for the one who is stranded.
And it is not hard to see why. The choosing moment is where these companies believe the contest is. It is where the click is won, where the conversion is measured, and where every euro of product attention has gone for a decade. So when a powerful new technology arrived, it went straight to the place everyone was already fighting over.
Which is the strange part. The booking moment is the one moment where no travel platform can win anything. There are nine other tabs open, showing the same trains at nearly the same price, and the decision comes down to three euro and a faster checkout. Nobody has ever been loyal to a search box.
The platform standing on that platform in Munich has the opposite problem. It is the only company in the world that knows this person is on this journey, and the only one present at the moment it falls apart. That is the one instant where it could be genuinely irreplaceable, and it is the instant every one of them has left unattended.
They aimed their intelligence at the moment they all look identical, and aimed nothing at the moment they could be the only one.
The traveller at platform 14 does not need a better chat box.
They need a system that already knew the ICE was running sixty minutes late, already knew it broke the 13:18, already checked what their ticket covers, and spoke first.
That requires almost no conversation at all. What it requires is deciding which parts of that job a model should do, which parts must never be left to one, and what happens when any of it is wrong.
So I built it.
