F Great Eastern
Established Member
This should be a lesson to everyone who uses this train,.
It seems the Stansted Express ticket collection system is on a different platform to all of the other ticket systems throughout the country. I know when you book tickets online from virtually anywhere you can collect them at any time from any station, no matter what you specify as the travel date or the collection station.
This does not apply with Stansted Express, I went to collect my discounted pre booked ticket tonight as I'm getting the 4.10am out in te morning, and it printed with TODAY's date even though my confirmation has tommorow's date. Upon reading my confirmation it does say I will only be able to collect my ticket on the day of travel, but then again all TOC's say this with fast ticket machines and that has never been the case elsewhere.
I went to query it and I am told the ticket collection and credit card machines near the Stansted Express Platform run a different system to the fast ticket machines and this is a system they inherited (Not a valid excuse as NXEA have been in 7 years now and before that NX ran Stansted Express) and it always issues tickets for the same day when collecting, regardless of the date booked and it was my fault for not reading the instructions clearly.
So a few questions
1) Why do these specific Stansted Express ticket machines exist for cards when the fast ticket machines sell all of the same tickets they do along with a whole lot more and also take cash
2) Why is the Stansted Express online booking system linked into these machines, in the knowledge they have this flaw when retrieving bookings. If I book Stansted Express tickets on the FGW or NXEA site I collect the tickets from a normal fast ticket machine but this cannot be done through the Stansted Express site as they are diferent codes (SE one has one les digit)
This kind of thing is typical of National Express though, when I spoke to someone else they said there was no point in buying new ticket machines when the old ones did the job pre ONE/NXEA winning the franchise. If this flaw was there 8 years ago it should not be there now.
Although admittley migrating the Stansted Express site onto the same ticket system as everything else in the country would involve in them redeveloping the old site rather than just the front end, dumping the old ticket machine system and buying new machines and spending some money so I think I answered my own question there. Surely it would be more efficent though than to keep supporting two different types of hardware and platforms.
It seems the Stansted Express ticket collection system is on a different platform to all of the other ticket systems throughout the country. I know when you book tickets online from virtually anywhere you can collect them at any time from any station, no matter what you specify as the travel date or the collection station.
This does not apply with Stansted Express, I went to collect my discounted pre booked ticket tonight as I'm getting the 4.10am out in te morning, and it printed with TODAY's date even though my confirmation has tommorow's date. Upon reading my confirmation it does say I will only be able to collect my ticket on the day of travel, but then again all TOC's say this with fast ticket machines and that has never been the case elsewhere.
I went to query it and I am told the ticket collection and credit card machines near the Stansted Express Platform run a different system to the fast ticket machines and this is a system they inherited (Not a valid excuse as NXEA have been in 7 years now and before that NX ran Stansted Express) and it always issues tickets for the same day when collecting, regardless of the date booked and it was my fault for not reading the instructions clearly.
So a few questions
1) Why do these specific Stansted Express ticket machines exist for cards when the fast ticket machines sell all of the same tickets they do along with a whole lot more and also take cash
2) Why is the Stansted Express online booking system linked into these machines, in the knowledge they have this flaw when retrieving bookings. If I book Stansted Express tickets on the FGW or NXEA site I collect the tickets from a normal fast ticket machine but this cannot be done through the Stansted Express site as they are diferent codes (SE one has one les digit)
This kind of thing is typical of National Express though, when I spoke to someone else they said there was no point in buying new ticket machines when the old ones did the job pre ONE/NXEA winning the franchise. If this flaw was there 8 years ago it should not be there now.
Although admittley migrating the Stansted Express site onto the same ticket system as everything else in the country would involve in them redeveloping the old site rather than just the front end, dumping the old ticket machine system and buying new machines and spending some money so I think I answered my own question there. Surely it would be more efficent though than to keep supporting two different types of hardware and platforms.
