Please, please, Virgin Trains, hire me to fix your website.

After trying to book a ticket from London to Glasgow, the website told me I couldn’t, and that it was likely that it wasn’t a valid route. Just in time I realised that I was in the Virgin Value ticket booking part of the website. Now I know a whole load about going from London to Glasgow, and I realised the problem - Virgin are pushing their Value brand of tickets, but you can’t get them less than three days in advance of the journey. Why I can’t just continue and buy a ‘normal’ ticket I don’t know - and how many people will either realise or care what’s going on?

Let’s take just one page of the many I’ve used, and I’ll savage it. After booking and paying, it tells you that a conformation is being emailed, or you can see the full confirmation by ‘clicking here‘. You then get a new window (bad), which is missing some of the toolbars (bad), and is a specific size (bad). The price is in ‘GBP’ (bad - I happen to know what GBP is, as probably do you, but still not something most people care about) and the booking reference number ‘is for Virgin Trains only’, not quotable at the station. This is again a facet of the company - web and telephone sales are a separate division from station ticket sales, and you can’t swap between them. I’ve ran into this before - I turned up to Glasgow Central to move my ticket back by a few days once, but it wasn’t possible for the aforementioned reason. Guys - deal with it. If it’s painted red and says Virgin Trains in big letters, it’s not my concern about your internal operating proceedures.

Anyway more on this one page - "We successfully reserved seats for some or all of your journey for this booking" - so which is it? Some or All? Do I have a seat from London to Glasgow, or just from Motherwell to Glasgow? You are giving me a ‘PIN’, not a ‘PIN number’ to use in the ticket machine, and if I need my ‘debit/credit card’ (it was a credit card I used, and the website should know that) why do I need an eight digit alphanumeric string as well? I have a ‘SUPER ADVANCE SINGLE ticket’, but what the hell is that? Why was I offered the choice between a ‘SUPER ADVANCE’ and an ‘ADVANCE’ ticket anyway - how often do I want the more expensive one? I might well be able to travel by the ‘AP ANY PERMITTED’ route, but where can I find out which routes are permitted? The service provider is ‘VIRGIN TRAINS’ - but can we please, please stop putting all the text entries in your database in FRIGGIN CAPITAL LETTERS? And finally, since you’ve already told me that I need to pick up the tickets from the machines in the station, should I really phone customer services if they haven’t arrived by post 1 day prior to my journey? I think not.

All said and done, to book the cheapest single from London Euston to Glasgow Central on Wednesday morning took me forty minutes, and it’s not like I’m either a web novice or a train booking novice. I can appreciate the complexity of the system that they have created, but I’d rather not have to appreciate it through a godawful website.