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If you can’t offer better value for premium, your service is broken.

I’m writing this from a spanish train. It’s 2 in the morning, and after 4 hours I still haven’t been able to sleep. The train takes from 10pm to 7am to fo from Barcelona to Madrid.

I got one of the upper-class places with a bed. That’ll get you a hot and small bed in a 6 people room. Odds are quite high that somebody snores in your room -having two or three people snoring is less probable but you bet it happens!

The high-but-not-upper-class provides a chair instead of a bed. If you’re very lucky, the seat in front of you will be empty and you’ll be able to sleep lying down. This seldom happens.

Regular-class are smaller seats in a room where you can’t turn lights off and, well, take a look at the picture below. That’s right! They put a bar in the middle so it’s impossible to lay down and sleep.

So the train company has a crappy upper-class product. They had two choices: Improving the upper class or crippling the normal class. Renfe chose the latter.

Improving seems like a big deal, but if you think about it just a bit some ideas pop up:

• I counted the seats. You can fit more or less the same people in each wagon, so the cost for passenger/mile is about the same, not depending on the class they chose.
• Taking a bed should be more expensive, because you need to clean them after each trip.
• It’s possible to deliver a better service for beds with extras: Air-conditioning, selling or giving free earcovers and blinds, free water bottles for upper-class, renting dvd players or videogames, etc. Happy customers are more loyal and don’t mind paying some extra bucks.
• Since costs are not very different, more seats can be converted to beds and divide these into two classes: seat or bed.

Crippling your product just doesn’t make sense. Users are not stupid. They realize you’re designing for pain and conversion, instead of for customer satisfaction.

It reminds me of the nineties, where some products shipped with a nag-screen that bothered you unless you paid for it. You know, at the end we’d just crack them or become so frustrated with the screen that we would no longer feel like paying.

Deliver high quality and satisfaction, and offer good reasons for going premium. Conversion to upper-class will come on its own if you put the right reasons in place. And users will gladly pay for it.

Writing to you guys makes me feel so much better. I’ll try getting some sleep now!

Personal Reminder: Start a private train company whenever spanish legislation allows it.