User-friendly travel information 

 
NS aims to give passengers more control over their door-to-door journey and more freedom of choice, irrespective of the means of transport or the carrier. High-quality travel information plays a key role here. ‘User-friendly travel information’ is a performance indicator we use to show the extent to which passengers have been provided with correct and timely information about platform changes, delays and train cancellations, and whether they received timely advice on alternative routes in the case of serious delays.

Information displays and PA announcements 

Since last year, international passengers can see on station displays at which letter sign on the platform their carriage is located. In addition, displays for domestic trains show where the display is in relation to the train yet to arrive. This ensures that passengers can line up at the right place sooner. In early 2024, Schiphol Airport station started to also announce disruption information in English. More languages and stations followed during 2024. This included taking steps to show multilingual disruption information on station displays, to better enable non-Dutch speaking passengers to take action.

Journey planner 

We redesigned part of the NS journey planner to better integrate other modes of transport, such as public transport bicycle, bus and tram, and simplify door-to-door travel. The technology is largely prepared for the rollout of new functionalities. Some minor changes have already been made, such as adding favourite locations and showing alternative bus stop locations of train replacement buses when a train is not running due to works. 

Proactively providing information on disruptions 

Many of our users save planned trips in the NS app. We update some of them with notifications about changes in their journey. When the 'Train Detection' function detects in the NS app that the user is on a different train to the one previously saved, we automatically update the saved journey to the train the passenger is currently on. We do this to increase the relevance of notifications. In addition, we send alternative travel advice if a delay increases to more than 15 minutes. We have focused on improving 'repeat journeys' so that we can proactively inform passengers when there are changes on their fixed route. This includes personal notifications about upcoming railway works. We also simplified the screens in the NS app that provide disruption and works information to make it easier for passengers to see how a disruption will affect their journey.