Back in September 2018, Rail Delivery Group
announced a new Passenger Assist app for both station staff and passengers to use for both booking and tracking requests, but there hasn't been an update since then.
From a staff point of view, I find that assistance issues mainly fall into one of four categories:
- Assistance has been booked to/from an unstaffed station and the operator taking the assistance booking has failed to capture a contact number for the passenger, preventing us from proactively offering an alternative (where appropriate).
- The passenger only requires assistance at their interchange/destination station, so doesn't make themselves known to a member of staff at their origin, which delays getting to them on arrival as we don't know they're on the train.
- Too many assists have been booked around the same time. Whilst it's not the passenger's problem, we only have a finite number of staff, and having multiple simultaneous assists means that someone's invariably going to have to wait longer than they should.
- Assistance booking problems. These tend to be coupled with a failure to capture a contact number, which means we can't provide solutions ahead of time. For example: During engineering work recently, we had rail replacement buses operating from a station that is only fully accessible in one direction - which is a bit of an own goal on our part. Unfortunately, an assist was booked for someone travelling in the opposite direction, and no contact phone number was provided.
Having just created a test booking to replicate the issues in points 1 and 4, it appears to be an industry failing that the passenger assist system doesn't flag the problems at the time of booking, even though there's a field for it to do so.
In terms of staffing levels (at least for the stations I chose), the basic indication is provided by displaying the station category (and, for unstaffed stations, the letters UNS) as part of the booking process, but accessibility can generally only be found by clicking on the "Station Information" button as few TOCs utilise the bulletin option to provide the details. This isn't ideal for staff in a call centre environment as it affects call handling times. Again, that's not the passenger's problem, but it goes some way to explaining why such issues occur.