ÖBB trains

 ÖBB, Austria's train operator, fails, but it wouldn't take much to bring it round.  Sadly, the fails get more and more annoying with time and repeat use of the service.

On ÖBB, business class is the top type of first class.  Basically, business and first are the other way round from on planes.  The business class seats are huge, just two to a row, and look comfy.  But there's a design flaw.  Lean back, and the chair starts reclining.  There is no support for someone who just wants to lean against the back of their chair.  The recline mechanism is always skidding around.  Ask staff about this, and they will always claim the particular chair you are in is broken.  Ask for a working one, and they probably can't do it.  As a one-off trick, they might be able to do something special with the mechanism that locks it upright.  I've seen this once.  All other business class chairs in the fleet are "broken".

Some marketing dipshit decided to hang magazines from hooks along the windows in every carriage.  These swing around, providing unpleasant visual distraction, to anyone with the things in their field of view.  Come on marketing dipshits, let's not have the swinging magazines!

Those looking for more active invasion of their field of vision, will be pleased to know that every carriage has bright backlit screens, which stay busy flashing all sorts of information back and forth, showing animations, flashing, and so on.  It would be possible to provide the same information subtly, but ÖBB want to flash their bright screens in everyone's eyes instead.  It's unpleasant.

You can buy a one-year card, called "Österreichcard" which is around 3k EUR for first class.  This does give you access to business, and you can take unbooked seats without booking, thus evading a little booking admin.  Sit down in business and someone usually offers to bring one inclusive drink to your seat -- nice.  But you're on a slidey chair, and there is probably a "businessman" shouting into his phone, so you're best to consume the drink and move on to the comfier seats in normal first, or second (all other seats on the train are comfier than the "business" slidey sliders).

The Österreichcard also gives you lounge access in the stations in a few bigger cities, Innsbruck included.  These lounges have nice coffee and fruit juice, better than that available in the restaurant car on the train.  They also display wide photos of Austrian mountain landscapes across panoramic arrays of screens, and it's well done.  The image only changes every few minutes, and it dissolves nicely, so it's not invasive.  Sadly, these are not the only screens in the lounge.  There are also bright, flashing, invasive screens, of the marketing dipshit variety, which ruin everything.  Mirrors are provided around the lounge, so that no customer can escape the assault on their visual system.  It's not worth going in there.

The restaurant car on the trains is poor.  Everything is made industrially, packed per portion in foil-topped plastic like microwave meals, ready to heat up quickly.  The heating might be a quick air oven, not a microwave, but the point is, you may as well be buying ready meals from the supermarket and heating them up.  That's what you're getting.  Compare this to a Czech train, where a fellow will cook up fresh ingredients in a pan.  ÖBB market their thing as such and such celebrity chef has designed their menu, which is marketing bullshit.  It's industrially-produced ready meals.

Local trains tend not to have any first class carriage.  Just longer distance ones have it. 

There is no integration of the Österreichcard with city transit systems, so passengers are left having to arrange city travel cards separately (in Switzerland, the GA covers city transit).

When I wrote to customer service by letter, I got a reply by email, even though I hadn't provided an email address in my letter.  It turned out the customer service chap had looked up my email address based on my name in their customer database, and used that for the reply.  When I said please don't do that, and just reply to the letter please, all I got was cheap enviro-signalling, about how he wants the earth to be inhabitable for his son, so he's not sending no letters.  WTF, ÖBB, your "customer service" refuse to send letters to customers, based on personal ideology?  A subsequent letter, about the flashing screens in the lounges, got no reply.  I didn't renew my card when it expired in the summer.

The network has decent rolling stock, is electrified, mostly runs on time, has decent reach.  The service is let down by a few silly annoyances.  If ÖBB fixed their business class seats so recline was optional, stopped the invasive flashing screens and swinging magazines in the carriages and lounges, and got some fresh food into the restaurant cars, the service would be pretty good.  But they're not going to do that, they're going to continue to employ enviro-signalling-dipshit who won't send letters.