I’m attending the Railfuture Branches & Groups Day in Birmingham on 26th October, and with the date less than 6 weeks ago, I thought it was time to buy my tickets. But the LNER website, hitherto my ticket buying website of choice, stated the date was too far in to the future and that tickets were not yet released for sale. Very strange since I thought there was a 12-week booking window across the whole network. So, over to the CrossCountry website, where, sure enough my tickets could be bought with ease. But CrossCountry charge a fee for passengers to collect their tickets from the machine at Morpeth, so I elected for “print at home”. A confirmation email duly arrived, telling me the tickets themselves would arrive in a 2nd email within the next 15 mins. But the 2nd email didn’t come. Impossible for me to have entered my email address incorrectly since the first email had arrived ok. I left it another hour. Still no email. I checked my spam folder. Nothing from CrossCountry. So I went to bed, having a somewhat anxious night, and checked again in the morning. Still no email. But this time I’m getting worried. I’m off on holiday tomorrow, not able to do anything whilst I’m away, and concerned that I’ll forget I haven’t actually got my tickets, think I’m collecting them from the station, and disaster will occur on the day of travel. So I phoned up CrossCountry. After a few minutes of being switched around (time I could ill afford the day before my holiday) I got through to the techie guys who asked me to confirm my email address. “Do you have an alternative email address” he asked. I gave him one, wondering why that was relevant, then back came the astonishing reply: “Our system doesn’t work with BT email addresses” he said”. “They reject our emails, but we don’t know why”. And sure enough, by the time he had finished speaking, there was the all-important email in my alternative address inbox. But hold on a moment, CrossCountry. I’ve just had a very anxious 24 hours worrying about this. Shouldn’t you at least put some sort of warning on your website? Or shouldn’t the Chief Exec of Arriva be phoning up the Chief Exec of BT to sort it out? Or are we happy to just leave our customers to puzzle and panic? How come the first email, with the transaction confirmation arrived ok, but not the second one with the tickets themselves? This is not good customer service, by any stretch of the imagination.
Is it always cheaper to book ahead? Apparently not, since on 2nd October, I got a promotional email from CrossCountry offering me 20% off my next purchase, and covering 25th and 26th October, my dates of travel. If only I had waited before booking my tickets. Grrrrhhhhh!
