Experience Atlas: Travel experience in intermodal public transport for service innovation

Kurzfassung

The decision to travel by public transport often involves navigating intermodal journeys, requiring travelers to switch between various modes like trains, trams, buses, and walking. These intermodal journeys are frequently associated with lower travel satisfaction due to unmet needs for safety, comfort, accessibility, efficiency, reliability, or information. The project Experience Atlas (German original title: Erlebensatlas) aims to address these issues by mapping geo-tagged collective travel experiences onto the public transport map to identify locations of collective positive and negative travel experience. This can help to identify where and why pain points occur along intermodal journeys and how they might be alleviated. The project explores various data sources for measuring travel experience. These include subjective traveler feedback during the journey, physiological data (e.g., heart rate monitoring), and contextual information like weather and traffic conditions. These datasets can offer a dynamic, real-time picture of the travel experience, enabling operators to spot potential service disruptions or traveler discomfort as they happen. This expo session talk will present results from such geo-tagged travel experience data collected in public transport of Hamburg and Berlin. In addition, it will discuss different approaches for visualizing such spatial travel experience data as an experience atlas. By this, we aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the travel experience by visualizing hot and cold spots of public transport experience. This offers the potential to improve service offerings, adapt information given to customers, and ultimately enhance traveler satisfaction across intermodal journeys. One of the key users of these visualizations will be mobility providers, who currently have no feasible option to understand dynamics in travelers’ experience. To ensure the visualizations are meaningful and actionable, we conducted a series of interviews with key decision-makers responsible for customer adaptation at a major mobility provider. By this, we identified requirements for the functionality of the experience atlas. These will be presented alongside the travel experience results and provide insights into what types of data need to be captured and how best to represent them to support service innovation. Overall, the Experience Atlas will enable mobility providers to adopt more passenger-focused innovations in public transport services. This, in turn, is expected to lead to more positive travel experiences and encourage greater adoption of public transport.