Sebastian Crane πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ

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

Booking.com - Wikipedia

Apr 5 at 10:45pmWeb
Show threadMaddy πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ - ADHD-powered 1d ago
@seabass Ugh, that sounds very much like how local concert venues have all their ticket purchasing go through LiveNation or Ticketmaster rather than direct these days. Bleh, I don't like it.
Show threadSebastian Crane πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ15h ago
@maddy Yeah, it's always depressing to get to the checkout page to discover that you've got a whole load of surprise 'booking fees' added to the subtotal. https://pretix.eu/ is pretty cool; I wish more venues would use it instead of these big anti-competitive platforms.
pretix – Reinventing ticket sales for conferences, exhibitions, museums, ...

pretix helps you to sell tickets for your event in an easy way. It supports multi-lingual events and provides a wide range of features

Show threadJayne πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ1d ago

@seabass

I know that redirects are a source of income for websites, but I loathe them.

IMO a website redirect just creates another copy of my data to be scraped 🀷

When I need to plan my journey in London, I use https://tfl.gov.uk/.

When I need to book a train, I book direct using https://tfw.wales/ or https://www.gwr.com/ depending on my journey.

When I need to book an hotel, I book directly using the hotel's own website.

Starving the redirect website's income is admirable πŸ‘Œ

Keeping London moving

Information on all forms of transport in London including cycle hire. Routes, maps, plan a journey, tickets sales, realtime traffic and travel updates.

Transport for London
Show threadOliver Blanthorn1d ago
@seabass they're really just modern pop-ups and should be treated as such
Show threadMartin Hoffmann1d ago
@seabass I keep seeing this happening with Booking – and only with them. Which makes me wonder if this is something they do in their own ads, which would question the assessment (which I share) that they are somewhat reasonable.
Show threadchaos Ξ˜Ξ”& (it/he)1d ago
@seabass what also annoys us that basically every train booking site is affiliated with that company that does the scammy subscription cashback program
Show threadSebastian Crane πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ15h ago
@chaos oh yes, all cashback programs seem to have an air of scamminess around them in my experience, but what I've read suggests that the one with which National Rail partners is the scam, the whole scam and nothing but the scam... I narrowly avoided falling for it when renewing my Railcard last year.
Show threadAnneH23h ago
@seabass People can use their local train company website instead. They serve uk destinations outside their own area.
Show threadSebastian Crane πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ23h ago
@annehargreaves Indeed! But that reminds me of another retrograde step on the National Rail Enquiries: you used up be able to select which train operating company you wanted to purchase the ticket from, but a year or two they changed it to always redirect to the company that has the franchise for the main (or perhaps first?) leg of the journey. No wonder so many passengers believe they need 10+ user accounts with each of the companies!
Show threadAnneH21h ago
@seabass How annoying of them. I've never used them. I always use my local one.
Show threadMatthew Vernon23h ago
@seabass for searching trains up (rather than buying tickets), traintimes.org.uk is a much lighter front-end to the same data.
Show threadSebastian Crane πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ23h ago
@demoographics fully agree with you there! That site has saved me on several occasions when the mobile network was showing as a mere sliver of a bar...