Two Together booking with Virgin Trains EC - website issue

I just booked tickets for Mrs Bungle and me to travel Newark - London after visiting family at the end of May, on Advance tickets with Two Together, on the VTEC website.

We normally travel with EMT as our "home" operator; when booking with them, I select number of passengers as 2, then Two Together railcard and number of railcards as "1". This correctly discounts both tickets.

Only on receiving the confirmation from VTEC just now, it became apparent that doing the same has led to only one of the tickets having the railcard discount applied - the other ticket has come out as an undiscounted Advance, leading to being overcharged £7.65. (£22.55 vs £14.90).

The VTEC website obviously expects the user to select a railcard for each passenger to receive the discount. This seems counter-intuitive in the case of Two Together (i.e selecting 2 railcards when only 1 is physically held), particularly when selecting 1 works perfectly well with other operators.

I've already emailed Customer Services and am awaiting a reply but it may take 10 days. It seems to me the website is not clear - it gives a total price straight away, which is nice, but offers no obvious breakdown of the tickets and makes it difficult to see that only one ticket is discounted. Is this my fault, or do I have reasonable grounds for a refund of the difference?

Also, in the event of no satisfactory response forthcoming, is this going to to make the discounted ticket invalid (as normally both should be discounted for travelling together on Two Together)?

Would be interested in the thoughts of the resident experts please!

 

Hi folks, thanks for your replies.

This is what the confirmation email says:

They were booked together in the same transaction, selecting 2 people for the same journey.

I guess you might be correct about the price tier - taking 1/3 off the "full" price of £22.55 actually gives just over £15, so the discounted £14.90 ticket could be from a slightly lower price ticket quota.

The point still remains - the second ticket has not been discounted as it should have been (thanks najaB for confirming what I thought regarding the website functionality compared to other websites) and I'm concerned that we might have trouble with validity if it's not sorted out. We'll see what happens...

 

Ah...... Now I feel daft! quite right.

Apologies everyone...

 

Yep. Spoke to them and they've told them refund less the standard admin fee and make a new booking. Haven't picked the tickets up yet so no need to send them back.

Can't really be bothered to argue with them about the admin fee for the sake of 20 quid - it's my own fault, it's not their problem that I didn't check properly so no reason for them to make an exception to the T&Cs. Lesson learned.

 

It does my nut when people pay peanuts for a restricted ticket and then bleat how unfair it all is when they make a mistake and/or things change and they expect special treatment or exceptions to be made. As an airline employee I see it all too often!

This is simply what happens when you have too many 4am alarm clocks in one month! Irritating but not the end of the world.