Well, that was a faff

[davidgillon]

I booked my train ticket to visit my folks over Christmas earlier. I knew there would be issues because I normally travel about the 17th to beat the rush, but that's slap bang in the middle of the scheduled national train strike  (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday out of the week after next, and each one messes up travel the day after as well, so basically the whole week is gone), so that's pushing a lot of people's travel into Christmas Week. I did mean to sort it out a week ago, but reasons. Anyway I started trying on Thursday, cheapest ticket £51. I could get in to LNER's website to book that, but every time I tried to reserve the wheelchair space, "Computer Says No!" - and I tried to book several different services over several different tries, so it wasn't just the one train having an issue. Primary (catastrophizing) hypothesis: everything's already booked, I'm going to end up having to travel next week and stay up there for a month!

So this afternoon I rang passenger assistance (which is the other thing you're told to try when the computer refuses the booking) and the guy on the other end says straight away "I can book you on the noon train out of London", which is a bit earlier than I'd prefer, but any wheelchair space in a storm. So we go through all the details and he transfers me to their ticket booking line. And I sit and wait. And wait. And wait. Now in their defence they did have some rather tasty Spanish guitar playing as elevator music, and they were offering a call back if you wanted it - "you won't lose your place in the queue" But they also kept telling me "You are number 1 in the queue", so the temptation to hang on was there, even if nothing was actually happening. I finally did go for the callback, and sat and waited. And waited. And waited.

I think it was probably the better part of 45 minutes before "You are number 1 in the queue" turned into "We're actually calling you." But that did go through relatively straightforward apart from "And you realise you'll have to pick up the ticket from the station?" The online booking system can mail your ticket out to you (for £1), the telephone booking system can't *facepalm*. Oh, and the cheapest ticket left was £81.

And at some point I have to go through it all again because that was only the ticket up, not the ticket back as they don't seem to have released the post-New Year tickets onto the booking platform yet. It was exactly the same last year. (And there's another strike scheduled for the first week of January).

I support the strikes, but they do make life complicated!

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Good lord. I am glad you got a ticket and one person was some sort of help.