Why are some staff so ignorant about ticketing matters?

Gareth1990 · 29 Jun 2026

I know it’s a controversial title, but ticketing is literally how the passenger gets to travel and yet staff seem so clueless. Yes I know sometimes TOC’s don’t give their staff information but why not take some initiative and look up the basics? Just now I enquired about the new Northern Explorer and the staff member didn’t have a Scooby about the ticket, despite advertisements literally plastered all over the station.

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ClivePage · 29 Jun 2026

I think it's that the national rail ticketing system is now so complicated that almost nobody understands more than isolate bits of it. Almost every week I learn something that I ought to have know much earlier.

I find you may be able to use it to your advantage - e.g. almost nobody understands the rules over break of journey, so if you quote that to a staff member on barrier duty you can almost always get through as the subject just baffles everyone.

Sonic1234 · 29 Jun 2026

There's a lot of agency staff who aren't that invested in the railway. It's somewhere they've been sent by an employment agency, rather than a passion or an actively chosen career.

Also, because the sort of things we use on the forum are rare. Very few passengers do break of journey, starting short, finishing early, using Rangers or Rovers. The majority of tickets are "day return to the next town" or "day Travelcard to London", particularly in the NSE area where even Advances can be rare. In the Oyster zones, tickets of any form are rare.

Inexperience, as much as incompetence, is the problem.

While I'm sure there are many that do a good job, I've never been impressed with station or gateline staff. The ungated unstaffed station is where customer service is the best if you are confident with ticketing.

Gareth1990 · 29 Jun 2026

I’m not even talking about barrier staff, but actual ticket office staff, the person serving me this evening didn’t have a clue about this new ticket, insisting that you could only buy the explorer with tokens from a newspaper. I’m not from the north so had no idea what she meant until I researched on this forum…

bramling · 29 Jun 2026

Gareth1990 said:
I know it’s a controversial title, but ticketing is literally how the passenger gets to travel and yet staff seem so clueless. Yes I know sometimes TOC’s don’t give their staff information but why not take some initiative and look up the basics? Just now I enquired about the new Northern Explorer and the staff member didn’t have a Scooby about the ticket, despite advertisements literally plastered all over the station.

Complex ticketing and transient minimum-trained staff.

The industry would rather hire people like travel safe officers than spend time training staff on ticketing matters.

Not saying it’s right, but this is where we are.

Egg Centric · 29 Jun 2026

ClivePage said:
I find you may be able to use it to your advantage - e.g. almost nobody understands the rules over break of journey, so if you quote that to a staff member on barrier duty you can almost always get through as the subject just baffles everyone.

I don't fully agree with that - my experiences breaking journeys with an advance (on the non-booked-train parts) to run an errand is that asking to pop out to e.g. go to pret has 100% success rate, BOJ 33.333% (after which I stopped saying it). Although I guess BOJ on advance is a pretty simple rule.

blimmo · 29 Jun 2026

I don't mind if the staff don't understand the more complicated bits of ticketing as long as they understand they might not understand. Unfortunately the training they do receive seems to give them confidence they're right without actually equipping them with the knowledge to be right.

TUC · 29 Jun 2026

I don't accept that complexity of ticketing or staff not being 'invested in the railway' are any excuse. Sites like BRFares mean it has never been easier to check queries and you don't have to invested in the railway for something to be part of your job, so just get on with it, 'invested' or not.

Iskra · 29 Jun 2026

blimmo said:
I don't mind if the staff don't understand the more complicated bits of ticketing as long as they understand they might not understand. Unfortunately the training they do receive seems to give them confidence they're right without actually equipping them with the knowledge to be right.

Agree with this.

Not knowing is fine but give the benefit of the doubt or ‘phone a friend’, however don’t challenge things you don’t understand!

SuspectUsual · 29 Jun 2026

To answer the OP, because there are precious few consequences for this ignorance

pokemonsuper9 · 29 Jun 2026

blimmo said:
I don't mind if the staff don't understand the more complicated bits of ticketing as long as they understand they might not understand.

Yes, I've raised some difficult ticket queries in the past and the staff that have helped me with them have always been good.
Maybe it helps that it's usually the guard (due to faulty ticket machine) so they're getting a nice bit of commission out of my day rangers as a reward for them figuring out where it is in their menu.

blimmo · 29 Jun 2026

pokemonsuper9 said:
Yes, I've raised some difficult ticket queries in the past and the staff that have helped me with them have always been good.
Maybe it helps that it's usually the guard (due to faulty ticket machine) so they're getting a nice bit of commission out of my day rangers as a reward for them figuring out where it is in their menu.

I've found ticket office staff very variable in both competence and attitude. You'd really expect them to be better than the guard seeing as selling tickets is the primary responsibility of the job.

Sonic1234 · 29 Jun 2026

TUC said:
I don't accept that complexity of ticketing or staff not being 'invested in the railway' are any excuse. Sites like BRFares mean it has never been easier to check queries and you don't have to invested in the railway for something to be part of your job, so just get on with it, 'invested' or not.

There's not invested and overconfident, not invested and confrontational and not invested and apathetic. The first two are universally bad. The third can be good on gatelines for break of journey etc.

The reason you get not invested staff at all is because there is little incentive to be invested. What incentive is there for the agency security worker on a gateline to be invested, other than pride in doing a good job - something that is lacking in many industries now. Worse case scenario, the employment agency tells them the station doesn't want them back but there's a role standing in the doorway at Sainsbury's.

speedy1 · 30 Jun 2026

Does anyone know if ticketing staff have annual (re)training?

And if the staff are routinely subjected to mystery shoppers or other such audits on ticketing matters (and are there any consequences to scoring badly)?

SuspectUsual · 30 Jun 2026

speedy1 said:
Does anyone know if ticketing staff have annual (re)training?

And if the staff are routinely subjected to mystery shoppers or other such audits on ticketing matters (and are there any consequences to scoring badly)?

There is definitely mystery shopping but I’m not sure whether it’s done on behalf of individual TOCs or collectively

Adam Williams · 30 Jun 2026

The mystery shoppers should buy excesses

Haywain · 30 Jun 2026

Adam Williams said:
The mystery shoppers should buy excesses

Many of them struggle to buy simple tickets. As I recall, they are given a 'script' to follow and yet the report can highlight things that weren't considered by the script. For a while I received the reports and would challenge were they had been marked down - for example, the mystery shopper at King's Cross asks for a ticket to Doncaster "on the next train", gets sold a ticket for the next train and then marks down the seller for not offering a cheaper ticket on Hull Trains or GC over an hour later! After the ticket buying they then mystery shop the on-train experience.

Starmill · 30 Jun 2026

speedy1 said:
Does anyone know if ticketing staff have annual (re)training?

And if the staff are routinely subjected to mystery shoppers or other such audits on ticketing matters (and are there any consequences to scoring badly)?

Generally, no. Their original training is also likely to have been incomplete or rushed. Many will ask their colleagues for informal support as this is the only way to keep their knowledge up.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 30 Jun 2026 ==

Haywain said:
Many of them struggle to buy simple tickets. As I recall, they are given a 'script' to follow and yet the report can highlight things that weren't considered by the script. For a while I received the reports and would challenge were they had been marked down - for example, the mystery shopper at King's Cross asks for a ticket to Doncaster "on the next train", gets sold a ticket for the next train and then marks down the seller for not offering a cheaper ticket on Hull Trains or GC over an hour later! After the ticket buying they then mystery shop the on-train experience.

Mystery shopping is often done in a wooden manner. For example turning up and asking about an obscure London cycle restriction time which almost nobody would ever genuinely ask for at that ticket desk. That sort of test isn't without value, as at least it shows if the reply is "I don't know the answer to that. Would you like to hold on for a couple of minutes while I look it up for you?" or something more confident but less accurate. But it's still a bit of an odd approach. Like really obvious 'white phising' emails sent by IT departments.

TUC · 30 Jun 2026

The issues often arise with gateline staff rather than ticket office staff, and so a basic level of training and of mystery shopper checks should also apply to them. There also should be a basic principle of, when an explanation of a ticket's validity from a credible source (be it a TOC site, BRFares or elsewhere) is presented to them, in the absence of specialist ticketing staff to check with, the description of validity should be accepted, if necessary with a screenshot taken to inform subsequent checking and training.

Watershed · 30 Jun 2026

Gareth1990 said:
I know it’s a controversial title, but ticketing is literally how the passenger gets to travel and yet staff seem so clueless. Yes I know sometimes TOC’s don’t give their staff information but why not take some initiative and look up the basics? Just now I enquired about the new Northern Explorer and the staff member didn’t have a Scooby about the ticket, despite advertisements literally plastered all over the station.

I think the issue is that there are misaligned incentives within the industry.

Revenue Management departments are tasked with maximising the revenue generated by the company; some measurement of that will be their main KPI/target no doubt. Hence they push for new ticket types, time restrictions and routes. But they carry no responsibility for the time taken to brief staff on these changes.

Pricing Managers are tasked with implementing the new ideas Revenue Management come up with. There is little to incentive them to do so in a clear or well-coordinated manner as customer confusion isn't a metric they are measured on. Hence you end up with multiple ticket type codes or restrictions codes that are basically the same, or inconsistencies across similar journeys.

The managers in charge of frontline staff are probably given targets along the lines of the percentage of the time gatelines are fully staffed or ticket offices are open. So they have little incentive to pull staff off those duties to give them training on new products, let alone recurrent refresher training.

Nobody is held accountable for the experience customers ultimately have, so it naturally takes last priority.

SuspectUsual said:
There is definitely mystery shopping but I’m not sure whether it’s done on behalf of individual TOCs or collectively

There certainly used to be mystery shopping at some TOCs. I did it through an agency called ESA Retail for a bit of ‘beer money’ years ago; at that time it was on a TOC-specific basis.

Of course, the requests you got were generally very basic - “return to London” type things mostly - so it’s no surprise that they would have showed high compliance rates.

Gareth1990 · 30 Jun 2026

It used to be the case that working for the railway you took pride in your job and knowing the ins and outs of the industry, what went wrong?

voyagerdude220 · 30 Jun 2026

speedy1 said:
Does anyone know if ticketing staff have annual (re)training?

I've not been offered any refresher training. I've been in my current role for over a decade and naturally some things come up much more frequently than others. I often end up opting to "phone a friend" if it's something I'm not sure about and haven't been able to find the answer online or on The Manual.

speedy1 said:
And if the staff are routinely subjected to mystery shoppers or other such audits on ticketing matters (and are there any consequences to scoring badly)?

I've never heard about myself nor any colleagues being mystery shopped before.

jamiestuart314 · 30 Jun 2026

I once had a ScotRail gateline person (i'm 99% sure they are employed directly by scotrail) who didn't know about the roundabouts, and thought it was a station called "roundabout" (They print as a single ticket with the destination set to "roundabout") after about 5 minutes of trying to tell her that its infact an all day ticket (they even have leaflets about it in the station in question!) finally got through.. though I will say this seems to have just been a one off, every other member of ScotRail staff I have spoken to about these tickets knows very well what they are.

Coleridge · 30 Jun 2026

On an Avanti train a few weeks ago, there was a passenger with learning difficulties who had clearly been given a ticket and told to show it to the ticket inspector when they asked for it. The passenger held a day return Carlisle to Preston, route via Penrith. It wasn't a split ticket. The train manager told the passenger that her ticket wasn't valid because the train wasn't scheduled to stop at Penrith, and insisted that she buy another one. The passenger was very confused and distressed, but the train manager simply insisted that she take out a debit card and sold her a new ticket.

I'm pretty certain that a ticket routed via Penrith is valid whether or not the train makes a stop there, but wasn't absolutely certain so didn't say anything at the time. Later in the journey, I went and found the train manager and quietly, out of others' hearing, suggested that she might have made a mistake with that lady's ticket. She told me she hadn't, and walked away. A little later, as she walked through the train, she made a point of stopping at my seat and told me that selling tickets was her job and please not to think that I know better than she does, before walking away again.

Regardless of whether the ticket was valid or not, though, the way the vulnerable passenger was treated was appalling. As was the way in which she went out of her way to make the scene that I had tried to avoid.

chris53 · 30 Jun 2026

Coleridge said:
On an Avanti train a few weeks ago, there was a passenger with learning difficulties who had clearly been given a ticket and told to show it to the ticket inspector when they asked for it. The passenger held a day return Carlisle to Preston, route via Penrith. It wasn't a split ticket. The train manager told the passenger that her ticket wasn't valid because the train wasn't scheduled to stop at Penrith, and insisted that she buy another one. The passenger was very confused and distressed, but the train manager simply insisted that she take out a debit card and sold her a new ticket.

I'm pretty certain that a ticket routed via Penrith is valid whether or not the train makes a stop there, but wasn't absolutely certain so didn't say anything at the time. Later in the journey, I went and found the train manager and quietly, out of others' hearing, suggested that she might have made a mistake with that lady's ticket. She told me she hadn't, and walked away. A little later, as she walked through the train, she made a point of stopping at my seat and told me that selling tickets was her job and please not to think that I know better than she does, before walking away again.

Regardless of whether the ticket was valid or not, though, the way the vulnerable passenger was treated was appalling. As was the way in which she went out of her way to make the scene that I had tried to avoid.

I have had one of those tickets and assumed it simply meant that it was valid via Penrith only as opposed to Preston to Carlisle via the Cumbrian Coast( Barrow, Whitehaven etc) . Have never had any issues whether the train called at Penrith or not. Must have done the journey dozens of times

TUC · 30 Jun 2026

Coleridge said:
On an Avanti train a few weeks ago, there was a passenger with learning difficulties who had clearly been given a ticket and told to show it to the ticket inspector when they asked for it. The passenger held a day return Carlisle to Preston, route via Penrith. It wasn't a split ticket. The train manager told the passenger that her ticket wasn't valid because the train wasn't scheduled to stop at Penrith, and insisted that she buy another one. The passenger was very confused and distressed, but the train manager simply insisted that she take out a debit card and sold her a new ticket.

I'm pretty certain that a ticket routed via Penrith is valid whether or not the train makes a stop there, but wasn't absolutely certain so didn't say anything at the time. Later in the journey, I went and found the train manager and quietly, out of others' hearing, suggested that she might have made a mistake with that lady's ticket. She told me she hadn't, and walked away. A little later, as she walked through the train, she made a point of stopping at my seat and told me that selling tickets was her job and please not to think that I know better than she does, before walking away again.

Regardless of whether the ticket was valid or not, though, the way the vulnerable passenger was treated was appalling. As was the way in which she went out of her way to make the scene that I had tried to avoid.

Sone rail staff need to learn that modern technology means that the assumption they know more than their passengers went away long ago.

it is also once again something the staff member could have checked for themselves within 20 seconds.

Mcr Warrior · 30 Jun 2026

So, what would have been the correct thing for the passenger to do in the circumstances described upthread by @Coleridge? Pay up reluctantly and then complain after (to Avanti or whomever)?

Coleridge · 30 Jun 2026

Mcr Warrior said:
So, what would have been the correct thing for the passenger to do in the circumstances described upthread by @Coleridge? Pay up reluctantly and then complain after (to Avanti or whomever)?

I hope that whoever was meeting the passenger in Preston, seeing her distressed state, would have managed to work out what had happened and made a complaint.

AlterEgo · 30 Jun 2026

Mcr Warrior said:
So, what would have been the correct thing for the passenger to do in the circumstances described upthread by @Coleridge? Pay up reluctantly and then complain after (to Avanti or whomever)?

There is no one "correct" thing for them to do, it will be entirely circumstance-specific.

This kind of thing never happens to me, but if it did, I would simply refuse to pay, and then just see where the waters of fate would carry me. I would enjoy the experience.

speedy1 · 30 Jun 2026

Coleridge said:
...
I'm pretty certain that a ticket routed via Penrith is valid whether or not the train makes a stop there, but wasn't absolutely certain so didn't say anything at the time. Later in the journey, I went and found the train manager and quietly, out of others' hearing, suggested that she might have made a mistake with that lady's ticket. She told me she hadn't, and walked away. A little later, as she walked through the train, she made a point of stopping at my seat and told me that selling tickets was her job and please not to think that I know better than she does, before walking away again.

I'd hate to imagine it being a case of picking on someone vulnerable. The way she returned to your seat to give you a telling off – which speaks volumes of her character – doesn't really convince me otherwise.

Why are some staff so ignorant about ticketing matters?

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