Obviously it is nieve (to say the least) to think that there will be public transport of any description on Boxing day a..
It is
not naive at all; several National Rail trains were running on Boxing Day. The passenger will have done a journey plan enquiry and been offered an itinerary.
I've just tried to replicate the purchase on the Scotrail website, requesting travel on Boxing Day, and it clearly only throws up services between Forres and Aberdeen on 27 December. So either there was a timetable loaded in error...
The working timetable applies by default unless an operator overrides it. The onus is on Scotrail to have its data correct at the time when people can purchase tickets.
You could say she was a bit daft buying the ticket...
Would someone who bought a High Wycombe to Haddenham & Thame ticket have been "a bit daft"? I say no.
f the Scotrail website - and we don't KNOW that this is where she bought the ticket, another booking engine might have done something weird - allows her to make a transaction then...
...Scotrail are obliged to convey the customer or pay the customer's costs for alternative travel.
It does not matter which website is used; the data for all accredited journey planners is specified by the TOCs. It's not the first time Scotrail have had incorrect data by any means; I am aware of other customers who purchased tickets with an itinerary, to discover at least one train on their itinerary is not running. I did provide some advice regarding this, but I didn't hear of the final outcome.
Scotrail needs to apologise, pay whatever expenditure was incurred, and put better safeguards in place.
As for this bit...
...you think someone would notice that a train was booked for a day it wasn’t running or been in touch.”
1) No, they cannot see what has been booked (unless reservations were available, opened and obtained)
2) No, there is no mechanism to do this; even if there was, it would be difficult to put the burden on a retailer and it would be a GDPR nightmare to require the original operator to contact the customer. And that still would only work if the customer who purchased the tickets had specified full contact details for the person using the ticket (problematical if a ticket is bought at a ticket office, or a corporate account, or on behalf of someone else etc)
It is true that some planners at at certain train companies have realised a train has been bookable in error, and then try to get it swept under the carpet, without informing other people in the company (such as front line or customer service staff), let alone get a message to customers. However people doing this whistle-blowing do not want the details to be posted on this forum.
The website in question shouldn't have sold the ticket if there are no trains running on that date.
It's difficult to know how to respond to this, as clearly there is a fundamental misunderstanding here!
OK let's say you run a website selling train tickets. How do you know if an operator has a mistake in their timetable? Are you suggesting operators add manual hacks to not show timetable data in certain areas and on certain days, and if so how would you even begin to do this?
Glasgow area services have run on Boxing Day for many years. The only two days that it's reasonable to expect no service at all are Xmas day and New Years Day. Any other day then people can be forgiven for believing there will be a service if they can buy a ticket.
How are people meant to know whether or not trains traditionally run on a particular line on a particular day? Surely they would be acting reasonably in using a journey planner, rather than ask someone who is aware of the historical nature of such services?
Surely you can use the same argument for this as for when a TOC removes services for a strike, like Northern, as they are in the timetable when booking and the itinary forms a contract with the relevant TOCs.
Yes if you book an itinerary and any TOC remove a train for any reason, you still have a contract, and any delay compensation will be measured against the original contract, and if no alternative rail service was available then the TOC whose service was deleted/cancelled is liable to pay for alternative transport costs incurred.
Perhaps they should have removed the Boxing Day services earlier?
It sounds like they left trains in the timetable for this date, so yes.
Whatever website sold her the ticket should surely have contacted her to advise of the error once realised otherwise there is little point in entering your contact details.
How will a retailer know?
Do all retailers know how to contact the person travelling? (in particular consider ticket offices, corporate accounts etc)
ScotRail replied to her tweet with:
I wouldn't have been impressed with such a reply as it does nothing to help her situation and neither was she. She tweeted a photo of her ticket which shows the date and said the following:
This sort of inadequate response is absolutely typical of train companies such as Scotrail and others. Some of them treat customers as if they don't matter. It's appalling.
