London Banter - View Single Post

Richard · September 8th 07, 04:18 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:56:55 -0700,
wrote:
But while TheTrainline.com has a de-facto monopoly (it seems all the
others license their system), nothing will happen. Particularly now
Trainline is owned by some venture capital firm or other - they have
absolutely no interest in spending money improving a product which has
the market by the balls, since they get little benefit out of
passenger satisfaction, while the TOCs get the bad publicity if
Trainline's crap web-app is unable to perform such basic tasks.

As far as I know, Trainline has many improvements on the way.

It has to be said, I don't know how much the underlying reservation
system can store - I know it was replaced a few years back, so one
would hope there are some custom fields available, but if ATOC
specified a like-for-like replacement....

It isn't like-for-like at all, luckily! Thinking back a few years...
if I remember correctly, the new reservation system has "attributes"
that can be set up for a seat, and the system can be queried about
which attributes are supported for a particular journey and then a web
app (or human) could offer those to the customer. Obvious examples
are window, aisle, quiet, wheelchair... It could be that the TOCs
could set up their reservation data better, rather than being a
feature of the web sites.

Richard.