theironroad
Established Member
Has the ability to book PRV tickets online for the cal sleeper stopped. I can see plenty of available berths without prv, but none on various routes/dates when trying to get a prv?
Has the ability to book PRV tickets online for the cal sleeper stopped. I can see plenty of available berths without prv, but none on various routes/dates when trying to get a prv?
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I've just tried a couple of PRV dummy bookings and the following message is returned:
That suggest a systems problem - I'd give them a ring.
Best picking up the phone and giving them a call so they will deal with your question/booking there and then.
I've tried twice, but been on hold ages both times so given up. Trawling their twitter feed has given me a possible answer, and it's not a good one....
You will only be able to make a booking at a ticket office if you use your rail staff discount card. This will be the process now going forward.
due to misuse
I've seen this ("recent") statement made on their Twitter Account:
https://mobile.twitter.com/CalSleeper/status/1076405819422461953
So it looks like they have withdrawn the online PRIV booking facility.
It was scrapped because people were misusing it. Many people who were not railway staff found out about this loophole where you could enter the code "PRV" and also select a railcard (as long as you had a railcard of course) and it would charge you PRIV fares but your ticket would not show the PRIV discount (it only showed the railcard discount). So because of this many ordinary members of the public were travelling on cheap PRIV fares when they shouldn't have been.
I've booked Dover - Calais with P&O a few times and it's possible to enter the relevant discount code without needing to enter your Staff Travel Card/TOC Privilege Card number. Never been asked to present the card at check-in either, though I've always had it on me.The P&O ferry website seems better setup where you have to actually put the number on your priv card into the website to obtain the discount.
I am unsure how open to abuse it is but it appear to work quite well on the surface of it.
It was a three letter discount code that was readily available to anyone with even very limited knowledge of the railway industry, and, in general, no further check. It provided a 75% discount.It seems the facility was open to abuse.
It would be a bit like if the self-checkout at Tesco gave you a 75% discount on your shopping if you typed 'OFF' into its payment screen.
(Don't forget, there were instructions and screenshots on the Rail Staff Travel page, which is available to the public)
Maybe it's because the archiving machine keeps interfering, (it is) but I still can't find anything about retired staff concessions or the Sleepers there.RST is currently experiencing an ongoing interruption of our phone systems. We are currently operating a limited phone service. We apologise for any inconvenience that this will cause.
Yes, but that requires more effort, and would be less likely to happen. It would appear that the trick online would give you a PRIV discounted ticket, without actually stating on the ticket it was a PRIV. Therefore people were able to obtain a perfectly valid ticket at PRIV rate.Couldn't they do that anyway, by showing their staff travel card to book the ticket at a ticket office and then giving another person the ticket?
Particularly with Sleepers, where a lot of booking offices don't do them very often, and even for those that do it is time consuming and holds people up in the queue behind.
As it's possible to have an online account with cal sleeper, I suggested to them yesterday that one work around could be that sea have to provide a copy of the staff travel card annually and that would be linked to the account.
Only the person named on the card could be on the reservation or if booking for is for another eligible staff or dependent, the account holder could tick a box to affirm a declaration that they are responsible. Abuse would be treated as travel irregularities.
Tbf to serco, no other toc I'm aware of allows Priv to be booked online and this is going to put them off.
The RDG and RSTL need to sort this industry wide to allow digital staff ticketing. If I can buy an airline ticket and boarding pass through app linked to frequent flyer account and can use fingerprint access to pay bills etc through my bank, then with a bit of effort RSTL and rdg can sort this.....if they want to.....
The only time I have used the Cal Sleeper, I was asked prior to boarding to show my PRIV card as it showed on my booking. That was before they introduced the online booking. I always suspected when I heard about it that it would be abused very quickly. Especially so as it appears that there was a loophole that prevented the PRIV requirement showing up.
I found it no great inconvenience to visit a ticket office to book it. The longest part of the booking was the clerk taking all the details that CS required on their booking form, rather than doing the booking and reservation itself.
I work in a ticket office and can confirm Sleeper tickets, Priv rate and all are easy to issue from the office computer. As they should be from every single station in the UK that can issue reservations as shown in Schedule 17.
It is not especially time consuming at all! The duration of transactions often isn't down to the ticket being sold, but the skill of the clerk in extracting the crucial information from the customer to establish what is needed. Obtaining and inputting the details required to issue the ticket shouldn't take longer than 45 seconds. I haven't sold a sleeper ticket this decade despite having worked at a station with a sleeper service, but that doesn't mean it'd take me any longer to do it. It's the same process as issuing an Advance, which anybody required to issue reservations should be proficient with.
The railways should be aware by now that if you give people an inch, some will take a mile - a proportion of the population have a cavalier attitude towards fraud/theft where the railways are concerned - if dodgy stacked discounts are available for sale, people will abuse it, simple as. Perhaps when CS are software testing, they need people who understand how to game the system to help them iron out such problems.
It's a pity it had to come to this, but it wasn't the only example of the CS site allowing the Priv discount to be used for something it shouldn't - I stumbled across another one a few months ago that arose in relation to the "no sharing with strangers" policy that was reversed - but the 'bug' remained open for some time after.