You should probably have told me that before I paid

[davidgillon]

Seeing as my LNER account was giving shenanigans and the last time I used it the tickets by post didn't actually arrive, I decided to pop down to the local station (Southeastern, not LNER, but everyone covers travel on everyone else) and buy my train tickets the old-fashioned way.

So I roll up to the ticket desk and tell the guy I need to go from X to Y on the Zth and back a few days later, "And obviously I'll need the wheelchair space for that."

He pokes at his machine for several minutes and announces a price.

Me: "That's fine for the outbound, but I checked before I came out and the return leg should be £10 less".

Him: Grumble, poke. "Okay, yes, there's two options and one of them is cheaper." (So why didn't you/your system find them?)

So I swipe my card and he prints out the tickets.

And only then does he tell me: "I can't book the wheelchair space from my system, you need to ring our passenger assistance people, you'll know their number".

For godssakes, this is a major commuter station, the teeny little (Northern) station at my mother's can book the assistance, the wheelchair space and print me out a summary of everything, there's no excuse for Southeastern not having the same capabilities in place.       

I'm all in favour of keeping ticket offices*, the idea of everyone booking online ignores the digital divide, but some stations are far better than others at handling assistance requests and there really is no excuse.

I didn't ring Southeastern's passenger assistance, because no, I don't know their number, I do however know LNER's who sorted it straight out.

* There's currently a train operating company** campaign to do away with all of them, and it's absolutely blatantly obvious that it will then be followed by making more stations completely unmanned. 

** Clearly orchestrated by the government, who've already been told this will breach the Equality Act by their own access body.

 

Comments

[hilarita]

It does piss me off how many train companies make it not possible to complete a perfectly ordinary transaction in one place. "Oh, you can only book seats this way", which mysteriously gets worse when you're not just booking seats but also e.g. need to book assistance, a special space (wheelchair, or bike, mysteriously usually even worse for wheelchairs).

[davidgillon]

This!