How to issue a Gold Card First Class Upgrade?

[afs]

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but I've not been able to find a relevant thread...

My local station (Aldermaston) is unstaffed and I normally need to purchase a £5 Gold Card First Class upgrade for my journey to Paddington (I like the free cake and water )

I have two challenges that I need help with:

1. If there is an RPI on the train, they insist that they can't issue a Gold Card First Upgrade. However one very knowledgable Train Manager on a Swansea to Paddington service once managed to do this for me, issuing a ticket which he told me was using a code "NFA" for Gold Card First Upgrade. I tried quoting this to an RPI today and in fairness, he tried hard but couldn't find it! Does anyone know how I can explain to an RPI how to find this on their portable machines?

2. If I go to the ticket office, the Gold Card upgrade they issue is incorrectly printed with a message "Only valid on portion: Out" (the £5 supplement is actually valid for the outward and return journey if it's the same day) which means that I've had a few difficult debates with Train Managers and ended up carrying a letter from FGW Customer Relations confirming that the supplement covers both directions of the journey. Apparently it's not possible to print a ticket that correctly states that the upgrade is valid in both directions. Does anyone know if this is the case?

I appreciate that not many people take advantage of the Gold Card First Class upgrade facility, but it's depressing the amount of time I've spent explaining to RPIs and Train Managers that I'm entitled to something that they've never heard of! FGW Customer Relations have promised me that they will brief their teams on how this works but, several months on, I'm still seeing the same problems!

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Adrian

 

[island]

I understand it is issued as a supplement at ticket offices, which is a bit of a faff to do if you're selling it separately from the journey itself, or if at a weekend the journey is covered by the gold card). On train, the Manual says guards should issue an excess fare and manually price it at £5, then write "1st class supplement" on it with a pen!

Any chance you could scan and upload one of the supplements you've successfully received?

By the way, I don't work on the railway so some or all of the above may be wrong.

 

[barrykas]

On Avantix Mobile (the portable ticket machines), it's in the "Supplements" list, which is accessed from the Main Menu screen, then I believe it's in the "Secondary" menue from there, though it could be in the "Tertiary" one.

Sadly it's not that easy to find, as Avantix defaults to listing all of the supplements you could possibly apply, regardless of relevance to the journey being made! Supplement codes are NFA for the Adult, NFC for the Child.

As for Ticket Office issued supplements, that's down to the way the system is programmed and there's nothing the clerk can do to change it, other than creating a local ticket type for it (which tends to be a Supervisor function, and needs various bits of technical information to do).

 

[afs]

On Avantix Mobile (the portable ticket machines), it's in the "Supplements" list, which is accessed from the Main Menu screen, then I believe it's in the "Secondary" menue from there, though it could be in the "Tertiary" one.

Sadly it's not that easy to find, as Avantix defaults to listing all of the supplements you could possibly apply, regardless of relevance to the journey being made! Supplement codes are NFA for the Adult, NFC for the Child.

As for Ticket Office issued supplements, that's down to the way the system is programmed and there's nothing the clerk can do to change it, other than creating a local ticket type for it (which tends to be a Supervisor function, and needs various bits of technical information to do).

Thanks Barry, that makes perfect sense. Although the RPI did his best today, he'd already entered the starting station and destination and neither of us could see a Supplements option on the screen. Should he have gone back a couple of steps, or cancelled the whole thing and started again?

It would be interesting to find out if there's any way of getting round the Ticket Office issued supplement issue, as it just seems to be wrong everywhere and it would be a bit daft to expect every local station to create their own ticket type!