Train tickets arrived... after I left

remembered_nights

I booked train tickets on the Monday to travel Friday at 11, and basically they didn't arrive! Well, they arrived with our post on Friday... at 12.30. So I had to re-buy the tickets at the station.

Looking at the site they are going to charge me a £10 'admin' fee on my £25 ticket to get a refund... which I am just a bit unhappy about :rolleyes:

I have emailed the help section, and after 5 days they have replied with an 0870 number to call and see if I can get the admin fee waived. More pennies out of my pocket...

I only used firstgreatwestern this time to use the £5 off they offered a few weeks ago, and that didn't even go through. Never again!

Sharon87

I always pick them up at the station as I don't always trust Royal Mail, especially at this time of year!

I think that's a lesson learnt, don't trust 1st class for urgent documents!

If you want a good train ticket website I prefer National Express East Coast as they don't have admin charges, just the ticket cost (unless you want Special Delivery lol).

Edit: You don't have to use the National Express East Coast trains, you can buy tickets for any trains in any part of the country

Aaaaant

If you did not receive them on Thursday you should have phoned them, or at least sent an email. The company should not have offered you the option of 1st class delivery if it didn't think the tickets would arrive. Since the tickets arrived after you're set to travel, I would put the blame squarely with the company. And like other people have said, the train company would have given authorisation to someone at the train station to print the tickets on their behalf. The amount of times I've done this is unbelievable. What's even more unbelievable is the amount of people who could easily "lose" their ticket and get another issued FOC. Of course, doing that is most likely fraudulent.

DCFC79

There is the option to pick the tickets up at the station, since you booked them on monday i would have gone to the station to get them, should have anticipated that they might be late especially since its christmas

remembered_nights

I had no idea I could get some kind of warrant for the tickets if I called

As to the rest... I see lots of excuses for the website. My answer is I have used a variety of websites to book tickets in the past, and have never had this issue before at whatever time of year. If previous websites thought there wasn't enough time to deliver the tickets, then it wasn't included as an option (as Aaaaant says)!

Also the code was genuine. I signed up as rules stated and was emailed it.

Pick-up is also a good idea, except last time the specific machine I would use wouldn't read my card so I am a bit wary of it now.

So yeah. As far as I'm concerned the job of a train website is to provide me with my tickets for travel. Virgin, eastcoast, trainline I can recc - these guys, nope.