Virgin Trains's mysterious full-price ticket promotion
'Temporary data problem' scuppers cheap fares
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Anyone wanting to book a ticket on Virgin Trains would be well advised to wait a little while as the company is currently unable to sell its discounted tickets, though its website will happily service travellers willing to fork out the full fare.
Register reader Graham Finlayson was trying to buy a ticket from Edinburgh to Cheltenham on the Virgin Trains ticket-booking site this morning. He discovered that all the cheap fares had mysteriously vanished since the weekend.
He told us: "I'm not bothered if it's down, that's fine. But if you go to the site and you think those are the only prices, then people will be paying them."
Thanks to a "temporary data problem", Virgin Trains can sell only its full-price tickets. The firm told The Register that the "temporary data problem" is preventing all new reservations, not just ones that would go through the website.
"We had hoped it would be fixed by now," a spokesman told us. "We notified all our retail outlets yesterday, but we missed the website."
He assured us that it was not a deliberate ploy to extract cash from bamboozled passengers, but a genuine oversight, and promised that a notification would be going up on the site as soon as possible.
Finlayson added: "I'm in the software business, I know that things break. But you have to tell people. If a message is going up, then that's good."
Virgin says it is working on fixing the problem and is still hopeful that the reservations system will be up and running again later today. ®
COMMENTS
Carbon offsetting?
At least as RB is donating all his profits from the Virgin travel groups to combat global warming its a silver lining on the expensive tickets? :P (Ref: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5368194.stm)
Hi Yes this is Richard Branson - Can you please bend over I have something for you....
Yes.... another good shafting!!
<RANT>
I am sick of Virgin, Telewest was awesome, they were cheap, their downtime was next to nothing, their staff (mostly) on the ball, their engineers a laugh and corruptable but now what do we have within the space of 3 months?
My telephone service has per minute billing, my broadband is throttled, my TV has lost the one channel that I like, the signal on said TV is less than favourable, I have monkeys on the end of the phone, engineers who dig up your garden and then decide that your drive actually looks better when the soil is put on top of your nice new crazy paving rather than the other way round, also they have seem to have taken a liking to cutting all of the wires connected to my ex-sky installation (come back Sky - im sorry, im sorry, it meant nothing to me), the Cablemaster -> ICOMMS changeover lost half of my notes, put me on a stupid telephone tarriff and removed call barring from my phone number which had to change when I moved because the local switch was just out of reach and they couldnt extend cabling, complaints take 5 times as long to get sorted and now to top it all off I get ass raped when trying to get a train ticket that should cost me £19.20 to over £50.
AND BREATHE...
You suck! and that is being polite, Give Telewest back to us, Even NTL was probably better than the chaos you have created.
</RANT>
What's a train?
A train is far too expensive any way - With three people, sometimes two - it is cheaper to go by car even with riduculous parking fees. And you don't have to sit next to some Norbert on his damn phone talking crap or some 'soon to be deaf' youngster with kerching kerching emmanating from his his lug-holes - rant over
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