Thursday, 7 February 2008
Buying a ticket for British railways
What National Rail Enquiries offers is either to print it out at a so called FastTicket ticketing machine or to get it by mail. The problem with option one is that these ticketing machines are only available at selected stations. But I will get on the train at Portsmouth Harbour were I will arrive by ferry from Le Havre. And at this station there is no such machine.
Option two only works for adresses in UK, but I wanted it to be sent to me in Germany.
I thought now it is time to call the hotline to ask what to do to get the ticket. So I called the hotline and as usual I had to fight my way through the oral menue telling when I want to go from where to where at what time and so on. After that the system transferred me to an operator. But first of all the line was bad and the man started talking like a machine repeating to me what just had told the system.
My goodness, I thought, here it goes again. Then I had the chance to explain my problem to a real person! After 20 minutes searching! But before I could understand the answer, the line collapsed compeletly! So I dialled again, fought my way through the system and again had a person on the other end. Of course another person with a strong accent which made it even more difficult to understand him on top of the fact that the line was still bad. His eventual advice was: "Then you have to buy the ticket at the station directly." Thank you, I thought. The point about
cheap tickets is that they there is only a limited number of them which is usually fully booked when you want to buy them last minute. So this advice didn´t help at all.
Eventually I decided to get the ticket sent to the Queens Hotel http://www.queenshotelsouthsea.co.uk/ I am staying at in Portsmouth.
But what would a person do who wants to travel on by train right away without staying at some place?
With the hotel the risk is that the friendly people at the reception might loose the mail, although I informed them.
Let´s see, I will report what happened when I am there on 18. February 2008.
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