If only no stars was an option (thetrainline.com)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	thetrainline.com
Date:	21/10/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None! NONE! NOT ONE! All right. The sky-blue webpage background I suppose is all right.

Disadvantages: Time-consuming to operate, very user-unfriendly, product being sold via website offers zero value

Presumably somehow, somewhere there exists an effective means of quickly transferring useful and accurate information on train timetables, routes and prices to the general public, but in my experience I can say that thetrainline.com definitely isn't it.

It's a website which in theory you can use to plan your railway journey anywhere in Britain (unless of course you intend using the main west-coast rail line in England, in which case your train journey will be broken up partway through as you transfer on and off a bus somewhere around Cheltenham, to leap-frog over the many broken bits of track). You put in the start and end points for your proposed journey, the date and approximate time you'd like to travel and then - in theory - the website scans all available rail operators to find you the most direct / economical routes for travel. You then select the tickets you'd like to buy, input your credit / debit card details for payment, and then if there is sufficient time for the tickets to be posted to you, they're mailed out to your address, or alternatively you can opt to pick them up at a designated railway station.

Unfortunately the ideal journey planning by website that I have described above never ever happens in practice. The first (relatively minor, in trainline.com terms) hurdle you'll encounter involves the selection of your starting and destination points; the railway stations are known on the website by particular names so for example it's no use typing in that you wish to travel to or from 'Bristol' without knowing beforehand whether the station you want is 'Bristol Temple Meads' or 'Bristol Parkway'. Selecting the time of your train is fraught with difficulty; in practice if you don't know the approximate duration of the type of journey you want to take, or have a good idea of when you'd like to arrive at your destination beforehand, there's a good chance that come the end of the journey you'll end up marooned alone somewhere remote in dead of night, long after all the station taxi-drivers who usually meet the trains have already gone home. Timing your travel is made so much more difficult by the fact that railway journey times in Britain are so very, very variable: a journey from the south of the country to a destination in Scotland can take anywhere between five or so hours - if say, you were travelling by non-stop express from e.g. London to Edinburgh, but on the other hand if you had to make many changes of train during your trip, a train-ride of similar distance could easily take three times as long - or even require an overnight trip. This makes pre-selecting your journey timings very difficult to judge.

Assuming you have managed to locate an appropriate train and select tickets for it, next comes the 'trainline roulette' element of the whole ticket-buying experience: finding out how much your tickets will cost. The single most annoying thing I find about this entire website is that while you can find train times and select tickets anonymously, it requires you to log in with a personal, pre-selected / pre-registered username and details before it'll give you anything by way of ticket prices. For people like me, who only occasionally enquire about train tickets then rarely end up buying them (mainly because of the expense: the last time I tried, earlier this year, even booking three weeks in advance, I worked out I could've spent a fortnight's holiday - with flights and accommodation - in Cyprus for approximately the same price as a Bristol-Scotland return ticket) having to log on to the site in order to access ticket prices is the most unholy pain-in-the-neck, as I can never remember what my registered username or password were, and by the time I've emailed thetrainline and waited for a reply to find out what my details are again, I am always so utterly and completely fed up with the whole palaver - and ultimately, disillusioned by what inevitably turns out to be the extortionate train-ticket prices - that I don't write the details down somewhere so I can remember them for next time.

I hate thetrainline.com. Just hate it. Loathe it with a fervour quite inappropriate for anyone to be directing at something as simple as a bad and inefficient travel-booking website.

Summary: Useless website for ineffective and overpriced mode of so-called public transport