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INFORMED SOURCES November 2001

Ticket web-sites proliferate in hard times

Railtrack has had to pull out of its totaljourney on line ticket sales web site – but there is still plenty of choice

In the beginning was thetrainline.com, launched in January 1999 at Sir Richard Branson's Holland Park mansion with the usual pizzazz. Planning journeys on line had been around for sometime, notably the excellent German Railways website, but buying train tickets on line immediately highlighted what is wrong with railways, and particularly fragmented railways.

Easy airlines

Today, the low cost airline Easyjet sells 80% of its tickets on-line. And whether you travel with Squeezy or Go, Buzz or Virgin Express or the daddy of them all Ryanair, buying a ticket is so easy.

Open the web site, enter origin, destination and date of travel and you are presented with a list of flights, usually covering the previous and following day too, plus the available fares on each flight. Decisions are easily made. Choose the 06.30 off Stansted and it's £30, travel at a more civilised hour and pay £60, go with the business travellers tomorrow morning and it could be over a hundred. Yield management on a computer screen near you.

And when you have made your choice and paid with plastic, there is a reference number to quote and an e-mail confirmation by return. When you walk up to the desk at the airport you show your passport, may be asked for the reference number and that's it. Ticketless travel 21 st Century style.

Hard railways

Railways unfortunately aren't like that. Well fragmented railways with 2,500 stations served by competing train operating companies aren't. So when you use thetrainline.com and its more recent competitors totaljourney.com and Qjump.co.uk, ticketless travel it ain't.

This means that you have to rely on the Royal Mail to deliver the tickets to your door, which rather defeats the object of the internet. For an extra £5, totaljourney.com will send your ticket by special delivery, which still means that you have to book three days ahead if a journey involves an early start. This is weakness is reflected in the preponderance of advance travel customers using the web sites. On totaljourney.com the average lead time is 14 days.

In an ideal world, by now the clever IT boys would have had a system in place whereby you could go to a station, quote your reference number or key it into a machine and collect a ticket. This has been available for telephone bookings at our local multiplex cinema for years.

On your TOD

For on line ticket sales to be really useful, you have to be able to book online, go to the station and collect a prepaid ticket. what I want is a Queue Buster ticket machine on my desk. And this facility is now on its way. There is even an acronym – TOD.

Under the aegis of the Association of Train Operating Companies a pilot scheme is to be run for a Ticket On Departure (TOD) service, similar to that used at my local cinema. Several train operating companies are collaborating in the pilot due to start in December. It will, I am assured, be instantaneous, With the station five minutes walk from my office, if summoned to a last minute press conference in London , I could buy my travelcard at my desk and collect the ticket from the self service machine on my way to the train.

Now that is as good as the low cost airlines. And, of course, as with the airlines, it works for telephone sales too. But where on-line ticket sales really suffer is in the complexity of the offer, particularly the heavily discounted advance tickets with limited quotas.

Where the airline sells its own tickets off its own data-base, the impartial on-line firms have to use the former British Rail Computer Reservation System (CRS) which holds each TOC's quotas of discounted tickets. This is old technology. Information on train service changes is improving: RJIS can download a nightly update. As for routing and the fares guide, weren't we promised this on a desktop PC in travel centres several years ago?

So the internet ticket sales firms face considerable challenges. Not least totaljourney.com, which fell foul of the Rail Regulator who dodn't think it right that First Group should have a joint venture with Railtrack. As a result the business, which is getting around 23,000 unique visitors a day, is up for sale.

With the railways and air travel, which totaljourney.com has just added to its offer, both suffering, it is not an ideal time to sell the business. There is a real possibility of the company closing.

This would be a shame, not only because I rate totaljourney.com as the most convenient of the three sites, but because the company also operates the invaluable Railtrack on-line journey planner which would close too if the business folds.

Readers may not have come across Qjump.co.uk which National Express Group only launched in September. National Express emphasises that its rail expertise went into the design of the site with the aim of making buying tickets over the web a simpler option.

Testing for this article, I found both Qjump and the GNER.co.uk badged version ‘powered by Qjump' slower than the other two. The interface was cleaner than thetrainline.com which can get very ‘busy' when selecting dates and is starting to show its age.

When it comes to on-line ticket sales, it really is a case of trying the sites and finding what works for you. But until there is a TOD machine at every station, the railways are going to lag in the ‘distance selling' revolution. But who will fund this universal facility?