I hate buying train tickets

I don’t have a very good record buying train tickets. The Trainline app that I use looks very easy to work with until you try and use it. And then the fun starts. It didn’t help that I was getting repeated “Only four tickets left at this price” messages all the way through the process. There was definitely pressure to complete the transaction as quickly and smoothly as possible. And the app did nothing to help this.

It turns out that if you forget to do something, back out of the action and then go back in the context is subtly changed. The first time this happened I nearly ended up buying tickets from the wrong place. The stupid application changed back to the previous transaction details when I popped back out of a new transaction to change the number of passengers. Then, having fixed that, I went back in to complete the purchase only to discover I’d only bought one seat rather than two. At no point did the application say “Hey! You’ve selected the couples discount but only bought one ticket”. So I had to frantically jump back into the app “Only three tickets left at this price” and buy everything again. And I missed out on my couples discount.

Number one son says I should just buy my tickets from somewhere else. I’m thinking he might be onto something. I just hope there will be trains on the day we want to travel.