Recently, one of my numerous flights departed from Luton airport which I haven’t used for many years. The reason why I hadn’t chosen it for long time was trains didn’t reach the airport directly, but stopped at Luton Airport Parkway. Then, we had to board old, smelly bendy buses to reach the airport. This was not only inconvenient, but also time consuming.
Having read that a new automated train system (DART) was installed, I decided to make this experience.
DART is very similar to the shuttle service connecting South and North terminals of London Gatwick airport. It is clean, quick (4-min trip), easy to find and take.
A quick note for those who would like to make the full journey by train (from Central London to Luton airport): be advised to select as final destination LUA, instead of LTN, otherwise the DART service won’t be included in your ticket and you will have to buy an additional one.
When you board DART, you find a monitor informing on the next departing flights, which is undoubtfully useful. This is the point of this editorial and it will become clearer soon.
When I fly from London Stansted airport (STN), for me it is more convenient to take a coach service. I choose the National Express (NatExp) company, instead of FlibCo, as the former offers one service every 20 mins whereas the other one every 30 mins.
Within NatExp buses there is a monitor showing the service number, destination, and time to reach final destination. It sounds great as it would be but, unfortunately, these monitors never show actual information. They display either the wrong direction or the wrong arrival time, which is confusing – if not alarming and worrying – passengers.
This is the point I referred before. When travelling, passengers need to be promptly & accurately informed about their travelling experience.
Someone in the past said it is better to have no information than wrong information, and this is proved right still today.
What surprises me is that nobody (among service providers) cares about this info service reliability.
Since very long time we have been experiencing travel information managed in silos: travel times of motorways are not available on urban roads and vice versa, urban public transport is not linked to inter-/extra-urban public transport, flights timetables are available only on airports website or apps (and some of them are not timely updated, in particular when disruptive delays are in place), railways and waterborne transport also show their timetables on their respective companies websites, and so on.
With the fast increasing travelling demand that we have appreciated in the last decade, the travellers information tools have not kept the same pace. When talking with fellow transport experts, they mentioned this is due to the different data formats each transport mode works with. It is certainly true but, more importantly, there is not a serious willingness to make the effort of merging/fusing them in such as a way that normal travellers could find easier planning ahead and checking their journey on-trip in order to understand what to do, especially in case of disruption.
This also is quality of travelling and a “smart” way of convincing people to use public transport (with consequent reduction of both traffic congestion and pollution), instead of their private vehicle.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2026
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