| The Dutch made some similar mistakes. A certain number of discounts (amongst them any sort of child-rate fares!) are only available with a personal OV chipkaart, but a) for a long time a personal card was only obtainable with a Dutch bank account and/or address of residence b) the only improvement these days is that residents of the countries with a direct border with the Netherlands (i.e. Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany) can get one, too, but it still needs to be ordered in advance. And anybody else is still left out, even though e.g. a resident of Lille (in France) is actually living closer to the Dutch border than a German from Munich. Another thing is that with the switch from paper tickets to the OV chipkaart they sort of got rid of cross-operator through tickets, which means that a) e.g. when travelling on the national railway network, you now need to pay attention whether you're also changing train operators when happening to change trains – in that case you must check out and back in again b) checking out and back in resets reset the distance-based fare price degression, so it's more expensive. I think they continued tweaking some things here, so it's no longer quite as egregious as when originally introduced, but it's still somewhat of a step back compared to real through tickets. And for anonymous chipkaarts there's a relatively high minimum top-up (technically 20 €, effectively 16 € as you're allowed 4 € of overdraft) required in order to be allowed to travel on the railways at all, which is unattractive for occasional travellers and shortish trips that might otherwise only cost a few euro (in which case a single use ticket might be a better option, as it "only" carries an 1 € surcharge). |