MSE Recently Recommended Trainpal

Pimlico

I followed MSE recommendation from last month in order to save £10 on the OAP Railcard.

Oooops - what a mistake!

They have now taken both my Railcard payment & they've tricked me into a further £3.00 payment for 3% discount.

I've just wasted 4 hours of my life trying to book a train ticket - the phone app (which you have to use to get the discounts) says that the train that I want isn't available so I booked it via the website .... and the eMail confirmation now shows a totally different train booking to the one I made. I can't use the train that they say I have booked because it is overnight.

I'm not a mad ranter - I am sure that eventually I will sort this out - but I suspect that I will have to buy more expensive tickets via Trainline or other online service, and will probably lose my payments to Trainpal (which are well over £100!). Plus - I can't speak to anybody about why the traintickets are different to my order - that is why I am going to have to buy tickets elsewhere & sort out whatever is their problem at some later date.

Just learn from my mistake.

Voyager2002

I have never tried TrainPal...

I have had good experiences getting discounts on both my Senior Railcard and on train tickets using Trip.com. I usually use TrainSplit rather than TrainLine.

Emmia

Really it's just best to buy your Railcard from the Railcard website, or through the app - and don't fall for the dubious "get a discount" popup which actually costs you money as you sign up for a monthly subscription which won't save you anything. 

Then buy tickets via the train operating company of your choice (I use GWR, but can book tickets for anywhere including services they don't run), saving the fees the Trainline adds on.

Mark_d

I tried Trainpal a while ago and regretted it.  I tend to use Trainsplit for my train tickets and they've recently been offering £5 railcards.

flaneurs_lobster

Emmia said:

Really it's just best to buy your Railcard from the Railcard website, or through the app - and don't fall for the dubious "get a discount" popup which actually costs you money as you sign up for a monthly subscription which won't save you anything. 

Then buy tickets via the train operating company of your choice (I use GWR, but can book tickets for anywhere including services they don't run), saving the fees the Trainline adds on.

That Railcard can be half price if you use the 2x points offer with a Tesco Clubcard. 

If you've any kind of reward bank account it's worth checking if there's a rail company on their list of companies offering cashback - as @Emmia says you can often book any rail journey via their site, not just their own routes.

Well worth checking out split ticketing too.

daveyjp

Simply avoid any third party reseller of anything rail ticket related.  Railcards from their website, tickets from the train operating company (by all means use a split ticket site to research savings, but still book direct)  Not only is it easier to buy, it is also far easier to claim refunds or delay repay payments.

Pimlico

Just an update - I went Trainpal because of the MSE recommendation, I won't be using them again!

The foulup with the train times seems to be because I had started the order with the app & then because the app reported that there weren't any trains on the day that I wanted, but I could see them on Trainline, I opened my account on the web where the trains did display, and booked them there. Once I had my tickets on the wrong times I tried to resolve things with their Chat help (which has limited opening hours). This is merely AI & always ends up at FAQ, but eventually I managed to trick it into allowing me an eMail. The eMail reply was that for a £9.99p admin fee I could change the ticket timess as long as I didn't change anything else. As I had run out of time (the process took 3 days) I left for my trip hoping to negotiate with ticket collectors. As things turned out I was travelling Monday when flooding and snow collapsed the rail network, so my trains were cancelled & everyone was travelling on the wrong trains!

deluca

Hi guys I bought a railcard this morning through recommendation on this website but no card received.
I left a trust pilot review and gone through Facebook...is this a scam???

FlyingDonkeys

It appears to be impossible to change tickets in the app. There is no drop-down menu or simple way to select a new date. Instead, it requires scrolling through thousands of train times to find one a couple of months ahead.

I’ve just become unwell and this process is extremely difficult to navigate. I would not recommend the experience so far, in fact it's unusable.

Has anyone successfully changed a ticket for a future date without having to scroll endlessly thousand of trains. ? If there’s a straightforward method, I’d be grateful for guidance.

At the moment, the design feels like a case study in what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification — when digital services become progressively less user-friendly over time. Any practical advice would be appreciated. See Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It Kindle Edition by  Cory Doctorow https://amzn.eu/d/0f7hsSEi if anyone knows what to do please help.