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Are e-tickets the way forward?

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Bungaroosh

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Although I have a smart phone, I'll continue to use and buy paper tickets for as long as they are available.

Anyone else not all that keen on being utterly dependent on one gadget for absolutely everything?
 
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Bungaroosh

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The thing is you're not. You can always print one out.
Print one what out?
If you mean a train ticket at home on an A4 sheet of paper, no thanks. I'll get a credit-card sized bit of paper from a ticket office or ticket machine.
 

Bletchleyite

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Print one what out?
If you mean a train ticket at home on an A4 sheet of paper, no thanks. I'll get a credit-card sized bit of paper from a ticket office or ticket machine.

Yes, you can print an e-ticket out on A4. Though I rarely do, only if I'm going camping by train and think I may have battery issues as a result.
 

PeterC

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Just as a matter of curiosity, do people flying into Manchester Airport not have pre-booked onward rail tickets from there, as many times when we have been at the booking office there, there have been discussions between the booking office staff and the prospective rail passengers on onwards rail travel that tickets needed booking for. With e-ticketing in mind, would these overseas passengers be aware as British rail travellers of how rail tickets in Britain are booked?
The impression that booking sites give to the inexperienced is that you can only book for a specific train. Not something to risk when you don't have a precise time for clearing customs.
 

Bungaroosh

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Yes, you can print an e-ticket out on A4. Though I rarely do, only if I'm going camping by train and think I may have battery issues as a re
I don't know if there's a survey function on the forum, but I'd be interested to see the results of a poll of members here: paper tickets vs phone app (to see how small a minority I'm in ..!)
 

Skymonster

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I really (and genuinely) struggle with the concept of someone finding a modern phone difficult to work.

No one has yet put up an argument to say that paper tickets are worth keeping...other than they personally prefer them.
I don’t find a phone difficult to work. I just find that using a phone is much more faff than a carrying a simple CCST when it comes to a rail travel, especially (as I explained above) in the context of barrier operations and ticket checks.

Paper tickets should be worth keeping while ever there are passengers who prefer them or need them - but as usual with the railway I suspect such is well down the list of priorities.
 

Dai Corner

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I don't know if there's a survey function on the forum, but I'd be interested to see the results of a poll of members here: paper tickets vs phone app (to see how small a minority I'm in ..!)
Here you go

 

Skymonster

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Although I have a smart phone, I'll continue to use and buy paper tickets for as long as they are available.
Me too because I find them far simpler to handle and less prone to failure than having a ticket on a mobile phone.

Here you go

That’s not so much the question though. The real question is e-ticket or paper ticket.
 

PeterC

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Cheque guarantee cards were originally nothing more than a letter of credit from your own bank printed on a piece of plastic. They weren't backed by any sort of payment mechanism. Until the 1990s if you wanted to pay for something using a piece of plastic you had to apply for a credit or charge card which was backed by one of the big multinational companies such as Mastercard, Visa etc. Indeed when I opened my first bank account in the 1980s debit cards hadn't been invented yet and it was the credit card that doubled up as the cheque guarantee card. Obviously once debit cards gained widespread traction they largely replaced cheques but cheques do still have a place in certain circumstances.
That would have been Barclays. They tried not to issue a guarantee card and force retailers into paying Barclaycard. The other banks issued guarantee cards long before debit cards were invented. Cheques were preferred to card machine slips as they were encoded for OCR processing.

Remember that until PAYG processors like iZettle and Sumup came along in the 2010s card acceptance required substantial upfront costs. If you didn't have the turnover to offset the flat rate fee you took cheques.
 

Bletchleyite

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Me too because I find them far simpler to handle and less prone to failure than having a ticket on a mobile phone.

I have never had any kind of failure involving an e-ticket on a mobile phone. What failures would you anticipate? M-tickets are a different matter, but I think those are junk and would go for CCST in preference to them.

By contrast I have lost a CCST and had to pay again (fortunately I was sold one, not PFed or prosecuted) and I have had failures to issue ToD correctly in several different ways on several occasions.
 

Clip

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Love E tickets - great for the family trips as kept all in one place and no need to faff about with pulling out a wallet or ticket wallet and shuffle through reservations and finding the tickets
 

Dai Corner

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Me too because I find them far simpler to handle and less prone to failure than having a ticket on a mobile phone.


That’s not so much the question though. The real question is e-ticket or paper ticket.
E-ticket is the second most popular in the poll.
 

Bungaroosh

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Simpler poll here about which is the preferred ticket method while travelling -- i.e. which you use on a train to prove that you've paid for your journey.

(I haven't used industry terms as, e.g., I don't know what CCST means.)

 

johncrossley

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With TOD (ie a traditional physical ticket) being the most popular.

However more journeys are available as TOD than e-ticket. For example, journeys where you can only get an m-ticket, not an e-ticket. These are typically available as TOD. Also journeys crossing London are not available as e-ticket or m-ticket but they are available as TOD.

There are also probably people reusing month return tickets as well, which is less 'risky' using paper tickets. That scam is probably more widely known by forum users compared to the average punter.
 

gg1

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However more journeys are available as TOD than e-ticket. For example, journeys where you can only get an m-ticket, not an e-ticket. These are typically available as TOD. Also journeys crossing London are not available as e-ticket or m-ticket but they are available as TOD.

There are also probably people reusing month return tickets as well, which is less 'risky' using paper tickets. That scam is probably more widely known by forum users compared to the average punter.
 

Haywain

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There are also probably people reusing month return tickets as well, which is less 'risky' using paper tickets. That scam is probably more widely known by forum users compared to the average punter.
One might read that and think that you are advocating such behaviour.
 

johncrossley

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One might read that and think that you are advocating such behaviour.

Of course not. It is baffling though that the industry has kept such tickets available for so long. A single only policy is beneficial, not only to prevent fraud, but to make journeys that don't involve returning fairer priced. Maybe back in the day having a return the same price as a single reduced fraud but not nowadays.
 

ainsworth74

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Yeah paper tickets are great! That's why when I collected them for a journey I'm making tomorrow I was confronted with this amount of shrapnel from the TVM that issued them:

So many tickets.jpg

Now fine I will confess that this is a set of split tickets but still, twelve pieces of card versus a single pdf or perhaps two at the most is just no contest in my book...
 

Bungaroosh

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Yeah paper tickets are great! That's why when I collected them for a journey I'm making tomorrow I was confronted with this amount of shrapnel from the TVM that issued them:

View attachment 114467

Now fine I will confess that this is a set of split tickets but still, twelve pieces of card versus a single pdf or perhaps two at the most is just no contest in my book...
You picked a typical run-of-the-mill ticketing situation there!

But didn't you glow at the satisfaction of going through them and putting them neatly into order after retrieving them from the TVM flap? I would have! ;)
 

ainsworth74

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But didn't you glow at the satisfaction of going through them and putting them neatly into order after retrieving them from the TVM flap? I would have! ;)
No I had to juggle them in my hands, making sure not to drop any, whilst I rushed to catch my train home as the TVM had taken so long to print them and cursed how annoying that was compared to just having a pdf in my phone ready for tomorrow!
 

Bald Rick

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What’s easier than having a CCST in a shirt pocket and getting it out for ticket inspections and barriers

having a phone in a trouser pocket, getting it out and unlocking it simply by looking at it, one, perhaps two touches on the wallet app, through barriers.
 

yorkie

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I have never had any kind of failure involving an e-ticket on a mobile phone. What failures would you anticipate? M-tickets are a different matter, but I think those are junk and would go for CCST in preference to them.

By contrast I have lost a CCST and had to pay again (fortunately I was sold one, not PFed or prosecuted) and I have had failures to issue ToD correctly in several different ways on several occasions.
Same here!
E-ticket is the second most popular in the poll.
But the most popular among the average passenger.
Yeah paper tickets are great! That's why when I collected them for a journey I'm making tomorrow I was confronted with this amount of shrapnel from the TVM that issued them:

View attachment 114467

Now fine I will confess that this is a set of split tickets but still, twelve pieces of card versus a single pdf or perhaps two at the most is just no contest in my book...
Blimey; do you know which of those tickets were not e-ticketable? Or was TOD selected by mistake?
 

ainsworth74

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Blimey; do you know which of those tickets were not e-ticketable? Or was TOD selected by mistake?
Annoyingly not, I bought through Trainsplit and don't recall changing to TOD (I only spotted that I was getting paper tickets when the booking confirmation came through!) so I can only assume that at least one of them wasn't available to be e-ticketed as Trainsplit defaults to e-tickets helpfully.
 

LOL The Irony

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To answer the question, e-tickets that can be printed on credit card sized stock is the way forwards as it offers the best of both worlds, especially for passengers who lack a printer but prefer the safety and reliability of a physical ticket.
 

py_megapixel

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You picked a typical run-of-the-mill ticketing situation there!
Even with a single flexible ticket there will often be a stack of tickets. Especially as some of the more stupid sites will generate reservations for all legs of a booking even if only one is marked compulsory, resulting in needless reservation coupons that often just say "Coach **, Seat **")

To pick a totally random journey for example, if I were to buy a return from Windermere to Stafford on Avanti's site, I'd get 9: the outbound and return portions of the actual ticket, a reservation for Avanti in each direction, a pointless reservation for Northern in each direction, a pointless reservation for LNR in each direction and a collection receipt.
 
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