East Coast have just sent me this today.
From 17 September 2012, collecting tickets from Fastticket self-service machines will be more secure. You will be able to print your tickets only if you have:
* The payment card used to buy your ticket. This will not be charged again.
* Your 8 character Customer Transaction Reference, given at the time of booking.
If you do not have your Customer Transaction Reference, you should contact the helpdesk for the website used to buy the ticket. For example if this was the East Coast website, please ring 08457 225 111.*
Travel Centre staff cannot print your ticket for you, only sell you another ticket.
Please note that you cannot reclaim the cost of any ticket you are unable to print from the Fastticket self-service machine if you do not have the booking reference and payment card.
*Calling an 0845 number costs 2p per minute during the day and 0.5p per minute at all other times when calling from a BT landline. Costs from other networks, including mobiles, may vary please check with your service provider before you call.
It seems to me to be making things unnecessarily complicated unless they have evidence that someone has managed to type in several valid codes -which are an eight character mix of letters and numbers which to my mind is 36 to the power of eight combinations or 2,821,109,907,456 possible combinations - nearly three trillion possible combinations.
Assume that on any one day there are 250,000 tickets to be collected (a generous figure to my mind) then odds of guessing a "winning real ticket combination" is less than 1 in eleven million.
So why the change?
What if, as my friend recently did,you loose the debit card you used to buy the ticket before you can collect?
and is this
"Please note that you cannot reclaim the cost of any ticket you are unable to print from the Fastticket self-service machine if you do not have the booking reference and payment cars"
either fair or proper? Just even?
One of the pleasures of certain ticket machines is not having to remember which card I used.
East Coast seem to have made life more complicated for no good purpose with odds of 1 in 11,000,000 on their side.