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Booking rail tickets
Our railway booking system system is a complete shambles.
Richard struggled with their web site for ages and finally managed to find a route from Poole to Glasgow via London that would cost Henry and myself £120 to go to Worldcon and back.
I phoned up to book the tickets and was told that they were cheap ones and were no longer available.
Not only that, but the woman in the Indian call centre assured me that there were no through trains from Bournemouth to Glasgow (as an alternative to going via London). I *know* that train exists. I've been on it when travelling up north.
I managed to find another person on the end of the phone by ringing a different number. After much discussion and by travelling a day earlier, we managed to find an option that would only cost £160 if we travelled a day earlier. I noted down the details and said I'd call back later as I needed to check Richard was okay with us going a day earlier.
When I phoned back again, I hit lucky. I got a guy who was really keen to help, struggled through different trains and different days of travel in an effort to find any route that still had cheap tickets on it. Henry and I will have to struggle across London from Waterloo to Euston, but now it's only costing us a total of £76 pounds. (I made sure to let him know how much I appreciated his hard work.)
Go figure why no one could find this route in the first place.
There is undoubtedly a fortune awaiting anyone who can write decent software for evaluating train journeys. The staff on the phone lines don't have decent software to work with. The web sites are not updated when the cheap tickets run out. The telephone enquiry lines are not updated either, and the long-suffering staff on ticket sales have to tell people that the ticket they believed they could get is no longer available.
Richard struggled with their web site for ages and finally managed to find a route from Poole to Glasgow via London that would cost Henry and myself £120 to go to Worldcon and back.
I phoned up to book the tickets and was told that they were cheap ones and were no longer available.
Not only that, but the woman in the Indian call centre assured me that there were no through trains from Bournemouth to Glasgow (as an alternative to going via London). I *know* that train exists. I've been on it when travelling up north.
I managed to find another person on the end of the phone by ringing a different number. After much discussion and by travelling a day earlier, we managed to find an option that would only cost £160 if we travelled a day earlier. I noted down the details and said I'd call back later as I needed to check Richard was okay with us going a day earlier.
When I phoned back again, I hit lucky. I got a guy who was really keen to help, struggled through different trains and different days of travel in an effort to find any route that still had cheap tickets on it. Henry and I will have to struggle across London from Waterloo to Euston, but now it's only costing us a total of £76 pounds. (I made sure to let him know how much I appreciated his hard work.)
Go figure why no one could find this route in the first place.
There is undoubtedly a fortune awaiting anyone who can write decent software for evaluating train journeys. The staff on the phone lines don't have decent software to work with. The web sites are not updated when the cheap tickets run out. The telephone enquiry lines are not updated either, and the long-suffering staff on ticket sales have to tell people that the ticket they believed they could get is no longer available.
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It can get worse - I book via the Trainline, but they don't actually tell you when you haven't got a reservation; it's only when the tickets don't arrive after a few days that you start to realise what's going on! When the three of us went up to Newcastle recently, we only got reservations when I rang up much later. There were many on the train without a reservation, and what's more who hadn't known that that would be the case. The whole train-load had to change trains at Leeds (and what fun that was) and when we got on, there was a 75+ year old woman looking totally bewildered as to why there were no seats available. Why they have to penalise the people with suitcases rather than the businessmen with no luggage is beyond me.
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I have had some exasperating dealings with Rail Enquiries, and have concluded that a lot of it comes down to the fact that neither their software nor their staff has much grasp of British geography (reasonable enough when the call centres are off-shore), and they're particularly bad at coping with alternative routes when a line is closed for works. For instance, on a trip in a vaguely south-eastern direction I was advised to start by travelling from Manchester to Preston (ie in a northern direction), and I was once given an incredibly complicated sequence of changes from Manchester Piccadilly from Hereford, when there turned out to be a very simple alternative starting from Manchester Oxford Road. And sometimes, they just don't seem to have been given the relevant information, eg when my sister was here at New Year the website insisted there was no way to travel from the airport on December 30, when in fact, because of repairs, there were frequent rail-replacement-buses to supplement the existing regular bus service. Station staff were handing out leaflets to this effect at Piccadilly, but no one seemed to have told Rail Enquiries - or if they did, someone had lost the letter.
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Henry managed to find the Bournemouth-Glasgow service, but only after the useful person on the phone had told us the time of one of them. When you know where/when to look, it suddenly appears.
I've been told to change at Clapham Junction for Waterloo, before now. The train goes right through.
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network should be forcibly given back to public sector, because the much-vaunted "it'll be better in the private sector" is manifestly not true, and at least before, shareholders weren't motivated to make profit at the expense of the traveller.
last November, I had to get from up here down to Oxford. For about two months, Apex fares were quoted, but not available because engineering works meant *no* reservations were possible. I had this sense of thousands of people daily checking to see whether the barely-affordable tickets were now up for grabs (and grabbing them).
Ended up going via London because they actually *had* tickets, and I needed to make plans.
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For all the current faults, there are more people travelling by rail than when it was public, there's better odds of cheaper tickets and there are more staff on stations when you need help.
Profit has the advantage that they *want* to encourage people to travel.
I've done a fair bit of rail travel under both public and private. The rolling stock has improved faster under private ownership as well. (Engineering works still prevented advance booking in the old days - that's not a result of privitisation. Yes, I've fallen foul of that one as well.)
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It's my first ever Worldcon, so I've honestly no idea yet what I'll be doing Thursday, but I'll certainly bear the party in mind. Thanks.