Ticket Agents in Great Britain

[McLeansvilleAppFan]

Seems the powers that be want to get rid of them.

https://www.rmt.org.uk/campaigns/rail/save-ticket-offices/
It seems the US and GB like to share the worst of each other's policies and never the best. Hopefully the RMT stops this and the idea does not spread.

 

[jis]

Seems the powers that be want to get rid of them.

https://www.rmt.org.uk/campaigns/rail/save-ticket-offices/
It seems the US and GB like to share the worst of each other's policies and never the best. Hopefully the RMT stops this and the idea does not spread.

I actually don't have a strong feeling this way or that on this. In the UK I have traveled there by rail almost every year except for the three COVID years, and in the last many years I don't recall ever using a ticket agent in UK for anything. All that I needed was easy to achieve through my iPhone.

I think there still is some need to keep agents around to deal with complicated situations, and serve those that are scared of devices. Other than that most of the high volume ticketing transactions can be carried out via devices adequately, except of course when occasionally those happen to fail.

It is important though to have a reliable ticketing system with good user interface available via kiosks and personal devices. For example Amtrak in its current state is not quite ready to go there at all, though in places like the NEC ticketing on personal devices is pretty much the norm now. Coming to think of it even for booking and modifying my Sleeper journeys, I have not used an Amtrak agent in the last 5-7 years. But I still think Amtrak's system is somewhat clunky.

 

[cirdan]

I must say guilty as charged as it must have been years that I last walked into any staffed ticket office in the UK or Amtrak for that matter.

I do understand though that not everybody is comfortable booking online, and especially when it comes to welcoming first time riders, the human touch can make all the difference.

 

[McLeansvilleAppFan]

I must say guilty as charged as it must have been years that I last walked into any staffed ticket office in the UK or Amtrak for that matter. I

I do understand though that not everybody is comfortable booking online, and especially when it comes to welcoming first time riders, the human touch can make all the difference.

I just hate to see the job lose unless there are plenty of equally well paying jobs to take their place and that tends to NOT be the case. I am all for efficient allocation of resources but not on the backs of workers that almost always are left worse off with the benefits being passed to others. Sometimes the benefits take a generation to work their way down. I often book over the phone with a person and sometimes online myself depending on the trip but I do sometimes visit a station. It is nice to have as an option. I generally make it a point to check in at the station.

I can't speak for British station agents but at my station the ticket sellers are also the baggage claims staff and the ones on the platform so they do serve other functions.

 

[jis]

I can't speak for British station agents but at my station the ticket sellers are also the baggage claims staff and the ones on the platform so they do serve other functions.

The rail travel experience in the UK is nothing like what you'd come across in North Carolina. I wouldn't even know who I'd check in with at say London Kings Cross to get on one of the hourly trains to Edinburgh. One just taps ones device or ticket on the platform gate, walk through it and go and board the train in the car designated on the ticket. For exceptions where one does not have anything to actuate the gate, one walks upto the one manned gate where the agent checks your ticket and lets you through.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Phones and kiosks are great when everything is working as intended but I would not want to depend on one exclusively. Consider my last arrival into ORD. NH and CBP busted my connection with no more flights home. AA's automated process would have left me stranded instead of earning money and paying bills. Because AA still had staff on hand they were able to sign me over to UA. On arrival to the UA terminal everyone insisted that I use their spiffy kiosk which cheerfully spat one useless error after another. Again, only because staff still existed was I able to (eventually) explain the issue and get home.

 

[jis]

Phones and kiosks are great when everything is working as intended but I would not want to depend on one exclusively. Consider my last arrival into ORD. NH and CBP busted my connection with no more flights home. AA's automated process would have left me stranded instead of earning money and paying bills. Because AA still had staff on hand they were able to sign me over to UA. On arrival to the UA terminal everyone insisted that I use their spiffy kiosk which cheerfully spat one useless error after another. Again, only because staff still existed was I able to (eventually) explain the issue and get home.

It is impossible to handle all IRROPS situations without human intervention. Usually the problem that arises is matching up the customer with the right agent. When things get matched well things work out well, when there is misconnect with the customer facing staff/automation that is when things fall apart spectacularly.

 

[trainman74]

The National Rail iOS app could use an update - it still uses the original iPhone app design standards.

(I realize it's possible to perform most of the same tasks using other, more up-to-date-looking apps, but National Rail seems like the most obvious place to go.)

 

[greatwestern]

It is many years since I used a ticket office here in the UK to purchase my rail ticket.

Even when I have not pre-purchased my ticket (online) I have used the self service machines at the station. At stations where there was neither a ticket office or a machine, I have purchased onboard the train.

At my local railway station (Bristol Temple Meads) in 2022/2023 of 3,780,000 journeys from the station, only 6.9% of the tickets were purchased at the ticket office - I rarely see any queues at the office windows and have indeed witnessed effectively underused operatives manning windows..

The intention is to move ticket office staff onto platforms and station concourses thereby having more direct contact with travellers - no doubt this would include assistance being available at or around the self service machines.

Bear in mind that most travel in the UK does not have the "complications" of such things as accommodations and baggage checking.

 

[cirdan]

I can't speak for British station agents but at my station the ticket sellers are also the baggage claims staff and the ones on the platform so they do serve other functions.

British trains do not have a checked baggage service as far as I know.

But in many rural stations, the staff also contribute towards the stations being pleasant places. Some country stations have hanging flower baskets on the platforms for example, not provided by any corporate marketing but at the initiative of the people who work there and on their own dime. There are plenty of stories out there of staff at small stations knowing all the regulars by name and welcoming them as they arrive for their daily commute. In some cases it is just the fact that there is somebody keeping an eye on things that may disuade grafitti and antisocial behavior.

 

[cirdan]

It is impossible to handle all IRROPS situations without human intervention. Usually the problem that arises is matching up the customer with the right agent. When things get matched well things work out well, when there is misconnect with the customer facing staff/automation that is when things fall apart spectacularly.

I think the inability to correctly match agents to customers has to do with silo thinking. If more agents were trained and qualified to perform more tasks there would be less mis-matching. There is little more frustrating for a customer to be in a situation where his or her train has been cancelled or something else happens where they need reliable information and the person at the ticket desk says "sorry, that's not my job"

 

[DetroitTed]

My experience with station agents has always been positive and helpful. One example is getting seat reservations without cost. It is much easier and quicker in my experience than doing it online. Also the information they can give for a foreign or out of town visitor is exemplary. I have often relied on them during my train travels in the UK. I'd hate to see them go. And a final shout out to the agents in KGX and PBO.

 

[jis]

My understanding is that a number of the agents released from ticket window duty will be placed on platforms and platform gates to provide help to the passengers. But they will continue to suffer from the problem of inadequate information given to them by the control centers when things go wrong. I had a great example at Kings X in my last trip to the UK a couple of months back....

I was trying to get to Cambridge from London on a Monday morning. The best way to do that is to take one of the hourly fast non-stop Great Northern service trains from Kings X to Cambridge via Stevenage and Hitchins. I show up at Kings X at around 9:30am and walk into total bedlam, and learn that there is signal outage so no service is departing or arriving. I find an agent and ask what could I do as an alternative. She said that Thameslink is probably running so I could just go over to Farringdon and get one. She believed that Finsbury Park was fine, since that is where the Thameslink trains join the ECML. So I hightail it over to Farringdon, and discover that the Thameslink trains are terminating at Finsbury Park. So the signal outage is somewhere upline from there which the lady at Kings X had not been informed about.

The next obvious choice was to hightail it over to Liverpool Street and get the Greater Anglia service to Cambridge which is much much slower, but at least is running, so that is what I did based this time on my own knowledge since it is hard to come by any information agent at Farringdon apparently.

 

[cirdan]

My experience with station agents has always been positive and helpful. One example is getting seat reservations without cost. It is much easier and quicker in my experience than doing it online. Also the information they can give for a foreign or out of town visitor is exemplary. I have often relied on them during my train travels in the UK. I'd hate to see them go. And a final shout out to the agents in KGX and PBO.

This absolutely.

Also in the UK it is not always transparent what the validity of your ticket is. Can you travel by a train other than the one on the ticket? Can you travel by a different operator than the ticket was issued for? What about connecting trains? Ticket office staff can often tell you these things at a glance, whereas the often rather cryptic language on the ticket and online causes more confusion than clarity.

 

[BlackDiamond]

On a recent trip to the UK my only interaction with a human regarding a ticketing issue did not go well primarily due to the balkanization of rail travel into separate Train Operating Companies. I had purchased tickets from London to Holyhead then via ferry to Dublin using the Transport for Wales site (as suggested by seat61) but they failed to send me a reservation number so I could not retrieve the tickets. The only ticket agents at Euston were LNER so they basically said "you have to take that up with TfW, not our problem". They did give me a TfW contact via WhatsApp so in the end I was able to contact TfW and get things sorted (as they would say in the UK ).

I agree that generally buying tickets from a machine worked the rest of the time I was there.

 

[jamesontheroad]

I got into a discussion about this on another forum, where I compared the UK (my homeland) to Sweden (where I live now). Sweden has not one single manned ticket office, and SJ is in the process of removing the last self-service ticket machines from the few big stations that still have them.

Sweden went down this path long before the UK because it had a much broader government strategy of digitalisation. Swedes rarely handle cash any more, and the majority of citizens have smartphones, so buying tickets with cash (or even a physical debit or credit card) is extremely rare. If you absolutely have to do it, Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven newsagents sell train tickets for a 100kr (USD10) fee.

IMHO, the UK has a lot of work to do to rationalise the ticketing system. There is a mess of pre- and post-privatisation fare structures, including differently priced single (one-way), return (round-trip), "rover", etc etc etc tickets.

 

[caravanman]

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I have and use all the whiz-bang techno stuff and yet I could not agree more with the cartoon above.

Sweden has not one single manned ticket office, and SJ is in the process of removing the last self-service ticket machines from the few big stations that still have them. Sweden went down this path long before the UK because it had a much broader government strategy of digitalisation. Swedes rarely handle cash any more, and the majority of citizens have smartphones, so buying tickets with cash (or even a physical debit or credit card) is extremely rare. If you absolutely have to do it, Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven newsagents sell train tickets for a 100kr (USD10) fee.

There is a compelling case to be made for including smartphones in train ticket options. The case for removing every option but a smartphone is significantly less compelling, although this distinction seems to be lost on some people.