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How to access Thameslink website from outside the UK

U

U-Bahnfreund

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6 Feb 2015
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552
Location
Germany
Hi, I'm trying to visit the regular Thameslink website from Germany, but I cannot find a way to do it. Whichever browser or link I use (I tried a few here posted on the forum), I'm always redirected to the Thameslink airport website https://airport.thameslinkrailway.com/?locale=de

Even when I change language to English and currency to Pounds, the button "back to main website" doesn't do anything and I'm again on the airport website.

Can other people outside the UK reproduce this? If yes, maybe someone on here can go on the actual website and contact Thameslink about it. It's really annoying. The only e-mail address I could find on the airport website is "support+wlpayments at distribusion.com", which doesn't seem very legit or helpful to be honest.
 
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RailUK Forums

8

81A

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Do you need to use the Thameslink website specifically? Because many other websites sell tickets/plan journeys for all companies (including Thameslink) and I think I remember recently managing to use several of them whilst outside the UK.
 
U

U-Bahnfreund

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6 Feb 2015
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Germany
I'm not looking for any specific, I wanted to search for some Thameslink core PDF timetables. But I just found it strange there's not way at all for me to open the regular website.
 
J

John Webb

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5 Jun 2010
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St Albans
Is it possible that the website detects where you are accessing from and then assumes you are flying into the UK and therefore need a train from the airport? If so, the use of a VPN might overcome the problem.
 
centraltrains

centraltrains

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I didn't know Distribusion had a UK Rail booking product! Don't like them at all for personal reasons lol

It looks like it's tied to the browser language setting. If I change my browsers top "Preferred languages" to German it redirects to the Distribusion site, but set top to English and for me at least it goes to the normal website.
 
U

U-Bahnfreund

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6 Feb 2015
Messages
552
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Germany
centraltrains said:
I didn't know Distribusion had a UK Rail booking product! Don't like them at all for personal reasons lol

It looks like it's tied to the browser language setting. If I change my browsers top "Preferred languages" to German it redirects to the Distribusion site, but set top to English and for me at least it goes to the normal website.
Click to expand...
Ah, thanks! This did it for me, I didn't think of that
 
styles

styles

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7 Dec 2014
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Gwynedd
centraltrains said:
It looks like it's tied to the browser language setting. If I change my browsers top "Preferred languages" to German it redirects to the Distribusion site, but set top to English and for me at least it goes to the normal website.
Click to expand...
Seems like an odd approach when they could use something more reliable like geoIP, or just not automatically redirect people to a site with no way of getting to the main website. I can see the logic behind it, but I'd have thought it would be just as easy to simply modify the content on the main homepage to be tailored a bit more towards airport journeys than effectively blocking access to all of the other parts of the website.
 
L

LLivery

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13 Jul 2014
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Southeastern land
Strange, I've set my VPN to Germany and have no problem accessing the full website from a Google search.

But when I click the link you provided to the airport version it takes me there, but when I click 'Zurück zur Hauptwebsite' at the top, that link doesn't work.

U-Bahnfreund said:
I'm not looking for any specific, I wanted to search for some Thameslink core PDF timetables. But I just found it strange there's not way at all for me to open the regular website.
Click to expand...

It wasn't long ago, that if you tried the Dallas tram system, you couldn't access the website at all from the UK. Seems to have changed now.

John Webb said:
Is it possible that the website detects where you are accessing from and then assumes you are flying into the UK and therefore need a train from the airport? If so, the use of a VPN might overcome the problem.
Click to expand...

A bit silly when it serves the Eurostar hub
 
KnobbyGB

KnobbyGB

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25 Jan 2024
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32
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Paros, Greece
For a couple of years I could never access the GWR website from here (Greece). The main page would load but I would get an error when trying to navigate anywhere. That seems to be fixed now at least. Now they just need some kind of online availability/booking tool for sleeper berths. I would use them two or three times a year but have never been able to book one. I just don't want to do it by telephone - I want to peruse what is available and fit it into the rest of my rather complicated trip.

I've never understood why companies in general put geographic restrictions on their websites. Another example is Tesco. I can't even access their Clubcard website when I'm in the UK! Their systems seem to detect that my phone (maybe the Google account) is from abroad and just tells me it isn't available in my location, even when I'm on house wifi and even with a UK SIM inserted! Why? What does this acheive?
 
T

To the trains

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24 Mar 2022
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Bath
I can corroborate that it's an issue with language settings: I have my phone set into Italian because I'm learning it but I'm in the UK and it still doesn't let me access any page other than the airport page in Italian, however hard I try to force it to show me other pages.

I've also had issues with some TOC apps not being blocked but having constant "our app works best in the UK, use our website instead" pop-ups, when I really don't understand what these region blocks actually achieve. When I was in 6th form they let us access the guest wifi, but it literally blocked the school's own website so you had to use a VPN to do anything (there was also no mobile reception, so you couldn't use data) and sometimes ran into region blocks.

So many sites are designed in such a way they give a terrible experience for multilingual users, stopping us from accessing content not in the language they think we want. So I speak French and English fluently, so YouTube thinks I want English videos to be AI dubbed into French and French videos to be AI dubbed into English (autodubbing should be off, not on by default). YouTube has plenty enough multilingual users that they have no excuse.
 
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A

Amalie

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5 Feb 2023
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173
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The Netherlands
styles said:
Seems like an odd approach when they could use something more reliable like geoIP, or just not automatically redirect people to a site with no way of getting to the main website. I can see the logic behind it, but I'd have thought it would be just as easy to simply modify the content on the main homepage to be tailored a bit more towards airport journeys than effectively blocking access to all of the other parts of the website.
Click to expand...
It’s quite condescending to me as it suggests that everyone that dares to set their primary language to anything other than English for their web browser only needs the Thameslink website for information regarding their airport service. Also because their logic would then be inherently flawed. Users from Ireland, Australia, US, Canada, Jamaica and India, or anyone else not in UK, with their browser set to English, would thus be treated as “British” in terms of which website they get.
 
styles

styles

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Amalie said:
It’s quite condescending to me as it suggests that everyone that dares to set their primary language to anything other than English for their web browser only needs the Thameslink website for information regarding their airport service. Also because their logic would then be inherently flawed. Users from Ireland, Australia, US, Canada, Jamaica and India, or anyone else not in UK, with their browser set to English, would thus be treated as “British” in terms of which website they get.
Click to expand...
Indeed. I wonder what happens if you access it from the US with the browser language set to English (though this may be specifically en-GB instead of en-US or en).
 
F

Flying_Turtle

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4 Apr 2016
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194
I can tell you it is awful with a gastly AI translation on the fly. In the case of Portuguese this especially bad because in my case it translates to Brazilian Portuguese which is somewhat different from European Portuguese...
The messe is enough to drive me away from the site, especially becaise the option of seeing the original site it simply does not do that!
 
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