Anyone else having trouble with Virgin seat selector?

[trainophile]

I'm trying to change my seat, as usual the already unavailable ones are greyed out, but when I click on a non-greyed out seat I keep getting "someone beat you to it, please select another seat". This is for all reservable coaches (well all in 1st, haven't tried Std). Travel date is 24th Jan so it's not as if the train has already departed!

Must be a glitch, wonder how I can draw their attention to it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This is an unavoidable quirk of how it works. If you change your seat, it makes the new reservation before it cancels the old one, otherwise there’s a risk of ending up with none. To do this it takes another entry from the quota your ticket is in. If there is no more quota, i.e. you have the last ticket at your Advance price level, this fails and you can’t change.

Short of a change to NRS there isn’t much they can do bar a better error message.

 

[trainophile]

Ah, thank you so much. Yes it was the last ticket at the price, so that explains it. Isn't this a brilliant website!

 

[csilke]

Short of a change to NRS there isn’t much they can do bar a better error message.

Isn't a solution to let you to pick the seat you want before any reservation is made? Instead of selecting facing/back, window/aisle, etc. you pick the seat and that is reserved as the last one from the quota.

Or Virgin could take the customer focused approach and, if the quota is empty, reserve the new seat as if the ticket was one not limited by a quota (e.g: anytime single) and not cancel the old reservation.