VOR opens new Service Centre at Vienna’s western railway station

The Transport Association for the Eastern Region (Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region - VOR) is improving its customer service by launching a Service Centre at Vienna’s western railway station.

"Every day 36 per cent of the people travelling in Vienna take advantage of the city’s extensive public transport services. This is a figure many other large cities envy us, even at international level", emphasised vice mayor Renate Brauner at the opening of the first VOR Service Centre at Vienna’s revamped Westbahnhof (western railway station).

The quality of public transport in Vienna had recently also been confirmed in the global Quality of Living Survey of the international consulting firm Mercer. Selecting Vienna as the city with the highest quality of living in the world several times in a row, Mercer also praised the excellent urban transport network. "The transport services and attractive fares within the Transport Association for the Eastern Region have certainly made a vital contribution to this result", assured Brauner. Members of the VOR management pointed out that the number of public transport users in Austria’s eastern region increased by 30 per cent over the last 20 years.

With its new Service Centre located in the "Bahnhofcity Wien West", the shopping mall of Vienna’s new western railway station, VOR offers a new face-to-face customer service experience. Four employees are available to assist customers by providing information on transport timetables and fares, selling tickets and answering questions about regional bus services. The opening of the Service Centre has been another step to expand the range of customer services. The electronic public transport journey planner provides information about more than 100,000 routes on a daily basis. About six million routes are on average calculated per month. Including "qando", the information service for mobile phones, this number climbs to 1.5 million. The VOR Call Centre answers more than 50,000 calls and 5,000 written queries per year.

New VOR managing director

In parallel, the VOR team moved to premises at the Westbahnhof station. The new offices are not only used for dispatching public transport passes to more than 40,000 pupils but will also host exhibitions. Last but not least, there has been a change in the VOR management. After Alexandra Reinagl joined Wiener Linien, Thomas Bohrn has been appointed as managing director. Bohrn has earned renown as a local transport and financial expert. He shares the management responsibilities for VOR with Wolfgang Schroll.

VOR plays key role in mitigating the commuting problem

At the opening of the new VOR Service Centre at the western railway station, attention was drawn to the fact that VOR would play a key role in mitigating the growing commuting problem. According to incoming managing director Thomas Bohrn, the VOR network is "well positioned" to tackle this issue. The top priority was to convince as many commuters as possible to switch from private cars to public transport. This initiative is mainly the consequence of the recent study "Kordonerhebung Wien 2008-2010" ("Cordon Survey Vienna 2008-2010") by the Planning Community for Eastern Austria (comprising the federal provinces of Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland) as it has demonstrated that there are more commuters to Vienna than originally assumed. Based on the survey, half a million persons commute to the Austrian federal capital on working days. Only every fifth commuter boards public transportation to Vienna. The data published last summer show that 528,000 persons on average cross the city limits on a normal working day - and only 21 per cent of them use public transport. New, long-term concepts have been developed to make the services offered by VOR more attractive to people commuting to Vienna.

The success story of VOR

VOR stands for "Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region", i.e. the Transport Association for Austria’s Eastern Region. Founded in 1984, VOR became Austria’s first transport association. On the kick-off date 4 June 1984, Wiener Linien (Vienna’s Transport Network), ÖBB (Austrian Railways) and Badner Bahn (a private train line between Vienna and Baden) were the founding members. In September 1988 twelve regional bus companies joined the association. Since then a single ticket may be used for all journeys in the eastern region of Austria, regardless of the means of transport used. The 8,400-km VOR network comprises 350 public transport lines. In 2010 VOR transported 908 million passengers. The company "VOR GesmbH" employs 92 persons. Last year VOR started to sell tickets for convenient transport services covering neighbouring cities such as Bratislava.