Why did the elevator take me up when I wanted to go down?

Depending on how your elevators are configured, the elevator may sometimes pick you up and take you in the wrong direction before reversing and travelling to your destination. This is known in the elevator industry as a reverse journey. 

If your elevator installation is being modernised, you will likely experience many reverse journies during the work while not all the elevators are in service.  This will be significantly reduced when all the elevators are in service.

While reverse journeys can be turned off, enabling them leads to a better overall experience for everyone. Here’s why:

• In many cases, the elevator is already scheduled to stop at your floor. By allowing you to board regardless of the current direction of travel, we can avoid an unnecessary stop later on, helping both you and others reach your destinations more quickly.
• If reverse journeys are disabled, the dispatcher might be unable to assign you the best elevator, as it may already be scheduled to stop at your floor. You won’t know to board until the elevator stops a second time, this time travelling in the opposite direction.
• Because some elevators are stopping at your floor and travelling in the wrong direction for you, the dispatcher has fewer options to optimise traffic management. Sometimes, the dispatcher runs out of options and needs to refuse to allocate you a lift and ask you to re-register it later. This can be very irritating!

To avoid confusion over reverse journies, our in-car display shows the elevator’s route, including all upcoming stops, so you can rest assured that we haven’t forgotten about you!

To learn more about reverse journeys, visit www.peters-research.com and explore our research paper in the Training and Support section under Research Papers. Every destination control dispatcher must decide how to handle reverse journeys; Peters Research has carefully considered the best approach to ensure an optimal experience for all passengers.