In the U.K. it seems that most rail staff that I know have a general dislike towards Trainline. Is it the same in continental Europe, or do the staff not mind it as much?
In the U.K. it seems that most rail staff that I know have a general dislike towards Trainline. Is it the same in continental Europe, or do the staff not mind it as much?
Comments
What’s Trainline?
Why do they dislike it? Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t it just a ticket sales site?
I’m admittedly not rail staff but I’ve never heard of Trainline in my life
Never heard of this.
Whats the point of this? Looks less functional than booking on the official website or app of the railservice…
The /r/uktrains subreddit often has questions about fare disputes and half of them can be explained by “thetrainline fucked it”
Not rail staff, but you should probably have specified what “Trainline” is because I’ve never heard of it.
Google tells me it’s like a skyscanner but for trains? But trying to search for something just turns up Flixbus and nothing else, no trains?
Either way, never heard of it, whenever I’ve needed to book European train ticket’s I’ve done it through DSB/SJ/VR/DB/Renfe etc. I generally don’t like to do third party for transportation, that includes trains, buses and planes.
Trainline is only a British thing just go to a company like northern or ScotRail to get the tickets to avoid the fee.
(From a French point of view) So I use Trainline at work to book my manager’s train. I prefer it from the SNCF website which is a total nightmare to use. Trainline is easy to navigate, straightforward, fast. I don’t know how me booking on trainline impact the rail staff as trainline provide me with a normal train ticket
I’m not a rail staff, but I’d rather check routes by the Man in Seat 61 (https://www.seat61.com/) and then look it up in various national rail websites.
Any country that isn’t maliciously stupid has a state-imposed fare distribution to begin with. You don’t pay the operator, you pay the transit agency and they refund the operator. This is because everyone who isn’t maliciously stupid knows by default that inconvenient public transportation defeats its own point.
While there are different companies (including UK National Rail) providing services on various train connections as contractors, all “public” train connections can be booked with the same Deutsche Bahn App, so there wouldn’t really be a point for an external app like Trainline.
I’ve certainly never heard of it before today and I doubt anyone really uses it here.
Trainline is funny because under the bonnet of the 15-odd franchised operators they all use the same ticketing and revenue system. I could go onto the East Midlands Railway website and book a journey on Great Western, a counter-intuitive comparison to in France where different branches of SNCF have their own ticket machines and tickets aren’t interchangable between them (e.g. beween SNCF Intercity and a regional service on the same route).
Their entire USP and the reason people still use them is because they’ve developed a better UI and can do split ticketing in places where this is a factor.
I can’t speak for rail staff but the prices you get are the same as what you get booking through the carrier. The whole site seems to be a marketing funnel for hotel bookings (where the money actually is) that uses rail trips as a hook.
This is like /r/USdefaultism but for UK – based on the replies nobody here in Europe has any inkling what Trainline is.
Why would you assume otherwise in the first place?