interesting weakness with ticket machine

katejo

A few weeks ago I did an off peak day trip from London Victoria to Rochester, Kent. I wanted to buy my ticket from the machine at my local station to avoid queues. The night before, I looked the ticket up on the machine to check the price without any problem but didn't buy it then. The following morning I went to buy the ticket but found that it wouldn't let me buy an off peak day return because it was still before 9.30am. I had no plans to travel before 9.30am but just wanted to buy the ticket. Why did it allow purchase the previous evening but not the next morning? I had to go to the ticket office at Walthamstow Central and buy it there. So much for replacing ticket offices with machines!

dzug1

It's to prevent people buying the ticket and travelling immediately and claiming it was OK because they were sold the ticket

The previous evening they assume people know what they are doing and they can't travel immediately anyway.

Not overly satisfactory reasoning - easy enough to pull holes in

A feature rather than a weakness that saves having to fine tune every ticket machine

katejo

To me that seems rather like a dumbing down attitude towards the customer. When i go to buy my ticket, it is clearly shown that an off peak ticket is not valid before 9.30am. The info is clear the previous evening and the following morning (day of travel).

jbuchanangb

I think it is a fairly new feature of the ticket machines to permit purchase of tickets the day before travel.

I haven't tried it.

What you can do of course is order the ticket on-line for travel after 9.30am and then pick the ticket up at the ticket machine before 9.30am. I do this quite often as the queue at the ticket office for people wanting tickets for the 9.37 train can be quite long.

katejo

I have found that tickets ordered online don't allow me to pay from the boundary of zone 3 which the local ticket machine now does. Hopefully that will change. I have a station right near my house so I tend to buy tickets from the machine there.

NectarCollector

in future, buy the ticket online and select 'collect at train station ticket machine' https://www.gwr.com do not have any booking fees (also can collect nectar points from this ticket website).

The previous evening it assumed you were to travel that evening as you selected 'off-peak'

agrinnall

NectarCollector wrote: »

in future, buy the ticket online and select 'collect at train station ticket machine' www.gwr.com do not have any booking fees (also can collect nectar points from this ticket website).

The previous evening it assumed you were to travel that evening as you selected 'off-peak'

Did you bother to read the post immediately above yours? You've wasted your time and mine.

katejo

No it didn't assume that I was going to travel that evening because I specified that I wanted a ticket for the next day.

bap98189

katejo wrote: »

To me that seems rather like a dumbing down attitude towards the customer.

Maybe if you are an expert in rail ticketing and familiar with all the ins and outs of the various types of fare.

But now imagine you rarely travel by train and have no clue about all that. You turn up at the station, find the ticket machine, put in where you want to go and just assume that whatever ticket it sells you will be valid?

Kite2010

Beware of TVMs on bank holidays, as the one at my local station didn't realise Monday was a bank holiday and hence was only allowing me to purchase the standard "anytime" fares rather than "off-peak" or "Super off-peak" which were valid at that time of day.

(Thankfully I managed to get my required ticket from the guard on the train, no way was I going to pay £75 for an anytime travelcard!)

The_Groat_Counter

Kite2010 wrote: »

Beware of TVMs on bank holidays, as the one at my local station didn't realise Monday was a bank holiday and hence was only allowing me to purchase the standard "anytime" fares rather than "off-peak" or "Super off-peak" which were valid at that time of day.

(Thankfully I managed to get my required ticket from the guard on the train, no way was I going to pay £75 for an anytime travelcard!)

You should report this to the train company that runs the station.