I have a confession to make.
At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.
It was empty.
Huh?
"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!
So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.
That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.
Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.
And waited.
Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.
And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).
The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.
So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.
Bugger.
15 comments:
Confession forwarded to GNER via iamspillingmygutsdotcom. :-) All's well that ends well.
Tosser on the starboard bow, Cap'n!
I had a similar experience recently after booking some tickets to fly to Jersey. I arrived at the airport brandishing all my various reference numbers, but they (VLM) wouldn't let me fly because I didn't have my paper tickets (they were at the post-office - you have to sign for them) so I spent a stressful 30 minutes calling the internet travel-agent, and asking VLM what my options were - it boiled down to two things
i) go home,
or
ii) Buy some more tickets you miserable worm.
I haven't complained yet (because the agent did send the tickets, I just didn't have the opportunity to collect them from the post office) but perhaps I should?
This sounds much like what would happen to me, sending the letters to another company, leaving my printout at home...I've done some degree of this the past couple times I've traveled, in fact.
Did you eventually get the refund?
Humbling! Reminds me of the story Douglas Adams told about the cookies he shared with another train passenger...
Hehe. Yeah, stupid is hard to avoid sometimes.
Hm, yes, has happened several times [blushes]. Most memorably, when I was in India, a couple of times I spent time arguing with vendors that they were short-changing me, when actually they were trying to give me more money that I was expecting; fortunately, they were such good-natured people that no harm was done.
Um, yeah. So everything's fine. Still feel kinda sheepish, though.
I am a huge believer in the power of karma to amend one's indiscretions; however, I really get steamed at complex and endless 'closing windows' for online transactions. It's lovely to get 'an email verification of your purchase' to delete later after it arrives the next day, and a 32 character alphanumeric file number to present to an utterly mystified clerk who can't in good faith seem to find your tickets. Every transaction done that way is as easy as if you were to show up with your five clueless buddies having stories that don't match. Even worse, when you don't take time to read the fine print, disclaimers, and multiple radio buttons giving you one last chance to opt out of 'special promotions' before you seal the deal. Hell, it's possible to end up with no ticket and a subscription to Conde Nast. Grrrr.
Hard to discount the value of sneaking over to a teller kiosk quietly on off time
Must be why you're so keen to go back.
Oddly enough, Richard Branson's Virgin Blue airline is a ticketless airline. It works very well. You print your confirmation slip (a copy is also emailed to you) and then shove it under a scanner at the airport. It has a barcode printed on it that gets you a boarding pass from the electronic counter clerk and you show that to airline boarding staff.
No fuss, dead easy. The only time you deal with people is to check oversized luggage. Your carryon luggage is all scanned by airport security.
Most airlines now allow you to arrive with no tickets, emailed or not. You just need to prove your identity.
So why are all of these people being forced to produce tickets... oh, they're from the UK, where customer service is still a distant speck on the horizon of commercial consciousness.
I've almost recovered from the experience of trying to pick up a prepaid rental car from Gatwick airport. 2 sodding hours of farting about and they still fucked it up. I was almost certain we were being filmed for some prank TV show, at times. "Computer says Noo-o-o-o-o-o..." kind of stuff.
That's what bugs me about this story. It's not like the Internet is new (or databases for that matter). Assuming there was some field where you had to enter the passenger's name, it should have taken no time at all to look you up - no matter who's account or silly 48 character ID was used. The fact that there are paper tickets to pick up at all surprises me - here you have to go through special effort to get any kind of ticket you don't print out yourself.
That being said, I did find my self in Edirne (Turkey), arguing with a hotel attendant who's english is only moderately better than my turkish about my reservation - with my nice printed out ID code for proof. Of course the poor guy working in the 1940's era hotel had never heard of the internet company that sold me the ticket, and charged me (again) for the room. The nice thing is that I used a credit card (as I always do), so it was as simple as calling my own credit card company to remove the original charge.
Speaking of which, does your bank card have a Visa/MC/etc. feature? If so you could have just called them up and removed the charge from the first ticket.
That nice Turkish fellow was perfectly well aware he had been paid, in my experience. We ran into all sorts of bullshit like that in Europe. Worst of all was Venice... a place where even the sewer rats shaft each other for a few cents.
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