Train delayed? UU students Daan and Michael help you get a refund

If your train is delayed by 30 minutes, you can get half the fare refunded by NS (The Dutch National Railway, Ed.). If the delay is one hour or more, they even refund the whole amount. It’s a regulation not many people know about, according to Daan, a 23-year-old Master's student in Business Informatics. And those who do know about it often don't bother finding out how to get that money back.

Together with Michael (24), whom he knows from his Bachelor’s in Information Science, Daan built the website trein-vertraging.nl. Anyone who uploads their OV chip card on their site immediately sees whether they are entitled to a refund. “We take care of the rest on your behalf and make sure the money is automatically credited to your account”, Daan says.

The website now has 13,500 users. Since March of this year, Daan and Michael claim they requested a total refund of 200,000 euros. Daan: “The feedback from users is positive. We haven't heard anything from the NS officials yet, but we have received compliments on our solution from some NS employees.”

How did you come up with this idea?
“The website stems from a project during our Bachelor’s programme. We had to build a dashboard that brought together data from public sources. We used the website rijdendetreinen.nl, which shows the current situation on the railways, and the data from the NS website, which shows where there are delays. We had to combine this information and results and present it in a user-friendly way. The task was not yet to build an actual website, but rather the behind-the-scenes programming of such a website.”

But you did take that next step towards building a website. Why?
“That came about because, during our research, we learned that you could ask for a refund if your train has a delay. We didn't know that, so we started looking into that further. When we realised that this could involve considerable amounts of money and that very few people knew about it, we started thinking about building our website.

Based on the dashboard from our study assignment, we built a system that brings this data together and provides insight into train delays. We set up the website all by ourselves, but we did use open-source resources. So, we didn't completely reinvent the wheel.

Nevertheless, it still took a lot of time to put everything together properly and build the website. Michael is mainly involved in the infrastructure of the code, such as working out the algorithm, and I mainly focus on the user experience, including the visual design of the website.”

How do you combine this with a busy study programme and a full-time job?
“Once I obtained my Bachelor's in Information Science, I started on the Master's programme in Business Informatics at UU, and Michael works full-time. It’s quite difficult to combine our studies and job with work on the website and it requires quite a bit of flexibility from us and the people around us. We mainly work on the website in the evenings and at weekends, so that we can get on with our studies and jobs during the week. But even during the week we must monitor the website and that does take up a lot of our time.”

What did you get out of this project?
“We got a 7 out of 10 for the study assignment, so I guess we were average students. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we learned an awful lot from professionalising a hobby project and setting up a ‘business’. For example, we now know how to scale up a website from one thousand to more than ten thousand users, and we’ve gained a lot of knowledge about software tools.

Since quite some time has passed between the study assignment and the launch of the current website, I doubt whether our teacher even knows that trein-vertraging.nl was born in his classroom. Maybe he’ll remember us when he reads this. That would be amazing!

We will continue optimising the website and marketing it. In the future, we hope to collaborate with businesses near stations to give people a voucher for a free cup of coffee on delay, or something like that. It remains a work in progress, and we'll see where it will take us. Wherever that may be, let’s hope it will be without any delays!”