Capvermell
On Moderation
- Joined
- 5 Jan 2014
- Messages
- 348
This is just to say I arrived Today (Bank Holiday Monday August 26th 2019) at the auto barriered entry only side of Horsham station so had to buy a ticket from the TVMs there before the barriers to gain entrance to the station to catch my train.
On selecting Cowes East and Return from the ticket purchase options the only ticket offered to purchase was a same day single or return Anytime ticket as clearly Southern doesn't bother programming their machines to know about Bank Holidays as it is presumably much cheaper and more profitable for them to commit criminal theft from customers by over charging them. This is even though all the terms and conditions for discount railcards of various flavours (mine is a Network Rail card) quite clearly state that the one third discount is available at any time on a bank holidays as well as on a saturday or sunday.
I was in a hurry to get my train but knew straight away I was being charged the wrong fare as I knew the correct fare with the one third discount from looking it up on the National Rail and Southern Rail websites where the one third network card discount on a bank holiday at any time is offered but as with various other anomalies such as not offering Ryde Hoverport as a destination on their TVMs (freely available to buy as a ticket to from a manned ticket window) it seems that Southern feels that having dispensed with human manpower also allows them to get things wrong and not offer the full fare range from the automated machines.
My journey was from Horsham to East Cowes on the Isle of Wight but on getting to Southampton Central I found that the same fiasco of the ticket machines not being programmed to know it is a bank holiday (so trying to charge peak hour fares up to 9.30am - Off Peak fares - or 10am - Network Card and other railcard fares of various kinds) also prevailed on South West Trains ticket vending machines. As a result of this South West trains had totally disabled all their full scale TVMs and there was consequently a massive queue of around 20 people at a single manned ticket window with the station barriers also active and manned and kept shut against the many passengers who would have missed their trains while they had to queue for up to half an hour to reach the ticket window to buy a ticket.
So now I have had to pay over £37 for a ticket that should have cost me just over £22 and now have to submit a complaint with the tickets in the hope that I will not be robbed of around £15. But it isn't just me who is being legally robbed by the rail companies but thousands of other customers travelling before 10am on a Bank Holiday.
Now may be this problem isn't widely known because a lot of people don't get out of bed that early on a Bank Holiday Monday but I find it utterly scandalous that the rail regulator is allowing this situation to occur and isn't imposing large fines and penalties on any rail company that shows this much disregard for the rights of all rail passengers to be charged the correct fare by the automated ticket robots that are slowly but surely replacing manned ticket windows at most stations and more and more times of day (as at many stations there are no longer any manned ticket windows at all at either all times or at least during large parts of the day).
I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has encountered this same problem before 10am earlier today and to also receive an explanation as to how the rail companies are being allowed to get away with such criminally incompetent programming of their ticketing machines...........
On selecting Cowes East and Return from the ticket purchase options the only ticket offered to purchase was a same day single or return Anytime ticket as clearly Southern doesn't bother programming their machines to know about Bank Holidays as it is presumably much cheaper and more profitable for them to commit criminal theft from customers by over charging them. This is even though all the terms and conditions for discount railcards of various flavours (mine is a Network Rail card) quite clearly state that the one third discount is available at any time on a bank holidays as well as on a saturday or sunday.
I was in a hurry to get my train but knew straight away I was being charged the wrong fare as I knew the correct fare with the one third discount from looking it up on the National Rail and Southern Rail websites where the one third network card discount on a bank holiday at any time is offered but as with various other anomalies such as not offering Ryde Hoverport as a destination on their TVMs (freely available to buy as a ticket to from a manned ticket window) it seems that Southern feels that having dispensed with human manpower also allows them to get things wrong and not offer the full fare range from the automated machines.
My journey was from Horsham to East Cowes on the Isle of Wight but on getting to Southampton Central I found that the same fiasco of the ticket machines not being programmed to know it is a bank holiday (so trying to charge peak hour fares up to 9.30am - Off Peak fares - or 10am - Network Card and other railcard fares of various kinds) also prevailed on South West Trains ticket vending machines. As a result of this South West trains had totally disabled all their full scale TVMs and there was consequently a massive queue of around 20 people at a single manned ticket window with the station barriers also active and manned and kept shut against the many passengers who would have missed their trains while they had to queue for up to half an hour to reach the ticket window to buy a ticket.
So now I have had to pay over £37 for a ticket that should have cost me just over £22 and now have to submit a complaint with the tickets in the hope that I will not be robbed of around £15. But it isn't just me who is being legally robbed by the rail companies but thousands of other customers travelling before 10am on a Bank Holiday.
Now may be this problem isn't widely known because a lot of people don't get out of bed that early on a Bank Holiday Monday but I find it utterly scandalous that the rail regulator is allowing this situation to occur and isn't imposing large fines and penalties on any rail company that shows this much disregard for the rights of all rail passengers to be charged the correct fare by the automated ticket robots that are slowly but surely replacing manned ticket windows at most stations and more and more times of day (as at many stations there are no longer any manned ticket windows at all at either all times or at least during large parts of the day).
I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has encountered this same problem before 10am earlier today and to also receive an explanation as to how the rail companies are being allowed to get away with such criminally incompetent programming of their ticketing machines...........