Switzerland’s crumbling infrastructure 🙄 🫠

A couple of weekends ago, Zürich Insurance Group wanted to celebrate its 15o^th anniversary by buying a train ticket for anyone in the canton who wanted one.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to get a day ticket (Nünipass), but were unable to purchase it through the ZVV app, the app for the Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, which runs the trains in canton Zürich. In order to get the deal from Zürich Versicherung, you had to use this special app instead of the SBB app (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen), which is for all trains in Switzerland.

However, the app was not responding very well and our travel time was coming up. We had to either,

1. Get around the error in the ZVV app
2. Try to buy the ticket from the desktop web site
3. Buy the ticket from the SBB and give up the free ticket
4. Move our travel time and hope that the ZVV error would clear up

We couldn’t do (1), so we tried (2), getting the following error:

ZVV Ticket Shop Ausser Betrieb 22.10.2022

The ticket shop is out of order.

Ok, that leaves us (4) or (3). We opted for (3) and had a lovely day in Zürich.

According to the newspapers the next day, the problem was cleared up a few hours later and the ZVV blamed it on “hackers”.