First Great Western overcharged railcard holders Dec 8th to 12th

bristol3

Warning - if you booked online with First Great Western between December 8th and 12th using a railcard, you have probably been seriously overcharged. And FGW has no intention of letting anyone know about the problem - they are waiting for customers to contact them, but the thing is that most people will not realise they have been overcharged, they will just think trains are getting ridiculously expensive these days.

If you know anyone who might have tried booking a rail trip with FGW using a railcard recently, please let them know and ask them to check the price they were charged.

Background: First Great Western launched a new website on Thursday 8th December, but obviously didn't roadtest it properly. The booking form on the home page let you input details of railcards, but the prices then brought up did not include the railcard discounts.

I spotted the problem on Friday 9th when I tried to book a trip I have made many times before, using a family railcard, and the prices which came up were twice what I was expecting - around £260 rather than £130.

I then looked around the site a bit and tried booking the same journey using the advanced search facility, inputting the exact same details, and this time got the price I expected.

Being a responsible person, I used the 'contact us' option on the website to let them know about the error, at around midday on Friday. I got a bland 'thank you for bringing this to our attention' email back a few hours later.

On Saturday evening, when I checked the website, the glitch had not been corrected, so I sent them a more strongly worded email. Sunday, no change, but I got an email acknowledging that there was a problem. I tried their facebook and twitter pages, but they don't have anyone checking them over the weekend.

On Monday morning at around 11am the glitch was finally fixed. I then asked them what they were going to do to contact people who might have been overcharged - the answer came back today: nothing.

Although everyone who books online gives an email address, they are not planning to send out an email warning, just hope that people who have been overcharged will notice. And otherwise enjoy the extra revenue their badly designed website brought in over the weekend.

JulieM

I've had this problem in the past with FGW so I always get my tickets from the booking office now. Sometimes the booking office can come up with a better price too, the web site doesn't seem to be able to deal with some discounts.