I'm disappointed to see that National Rail Inquiries - that is, the 'official' railway ticket retailer in the UK, operated by the Rail Delivery Group - has started adding automatic redirects to Booking.com when you search for a itinerary. My complaint isn't so much about their use of this hotel reservations intermediary in particular; I'm a customer myself and they're actually somewhat reasonable to customers (their anti-competitive business practices notwithstanding). This is why I'm not happy:

• silently redirecting users to other sites and opening extra tabs is confusing to all but the most tech-savvy users
• there's no option for users to turn this off for good
• it's already a slow and resource-heavy website, and yet is exactly the thing which many users may be using in a hurry and on patchy mobile connections - now, it wants to open up another tab containing loads of images on every query
• this change further entrenches an existing near-monopoly, when this could have been a way of supporting independent hotels and keeping public money in the UK economy

My suggestion is to use TrainSplit instead, who actually know how to make a user-friendly website (I am not affiliated with them nor am I paid for saying this).

#ukrail #railticketing

One of the issues in the forthcoming reform of #RailTicketing #SDBTR in the EU: can passengers bundle tickets together themselves, or would a ticket reseller have to do it?

Booking horizons - basically how far ahead of the trip a ticket can be bought - are a major barrier to making the latter approach work

So let passengers bundle themselves?

Explained 👇
https://jonworth.eu/bundling-up-tickets-and-booking-horizons-railways-are-making-a-problem-for-themselves/