Great Western Railway

This app often leaves me waiting at the barriers, or waiting when I need to show my ticket, as it “busy wheels” for 10-15 seconds when I try to view my tickets. These are tickets that I’ve already viewed in the app to make sure they are there. What on earth is it doing? Another problem is that old tickets often remain in the app after I have already completed the journey. I currently have 3 old tickets in “travel for today “ section. Finally, the UI for this app could be improved. The first time I used it, it took me a while to find my ticket for travel, since when you select the Tickets option at the bottom it takes you to the page for buying tickets. Only after a while did I notice amongst all the options for buying a ticket there was a button to view already purchased tickets. Surely if you run the app around the time of a train that you have a ticket for, it should go straight to showing that ticket?

The GWR app is bit cumbersome with lots of different layers to go through. It just doesn’t seem very user friendly. Plus each time I’ve tried to use it today it kept closing itself. I also can’t find a way to change the station I would like to pick my tickets up from. It always defaults to the station my ticket is valid from but this isn’t always the most convenient place for me to collect them or I may not be starting my journey from there and I can find no way of changing this on the app which means I have to go to the website which doesn’t seem to be working either. Gave up in the end and bought my GWR train tickets on the Virgin Train app for the same price. At least it means I can pick my ticket up now from any station.

This is generally a good app for train times etc. The e-ticketing capability is a great idea, but purchasing a ticket is very slow and tortuous. I generally travel the same route two or three times a week, but each time I go to buy an e-ticket I need to specify the date, change ‘single’ to ‘return’ and then I need to manually select the outbound and return trains (not easy and totally irrelevant for me). Then have to skip additional options, long pause, arrive at credit card screen which needs to be filled in from scratch each time! Each screen transition takes around 10 seconds, by which time it’s taken me over 3 minutes of fiddling to buy a simple ticket. For now I just use the station’s ticket machine and get a paper one. The day an update arrives with a simple repeat-ticket capability and that stores my payment details, this will become a 5* app!

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As my local station has no ticket machine, I was excited to discover I could buy my tickets via the GWR App. Unfortunately, that excitement was quickly replaced by disbelief at the awful user experience and the inability to display my e-tickets when required to do so. Buying a ticket for a frequently used peak return journey should not require me to specify the stations; the type of journey; the outbound and inbound trains; select the ticket (there’s only ever one choice); additional transport needs and delivery method, and that’s before you complete the actual payment part of the journey. This brings me to my second gripe, accessing the purchased e-ticket. I have spent more time at my destination waiting for the ticket to be displayed than I ever did queuing for a ticket and this despite having a 5 bar 4G signal! On one occasion I was forced to buy another ticket and told I could claim the value of the elusive e-ticket back, only to discover there was a £10 standard charge for doing this - my ticket cost £6.80!

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Actually makes using the website far easier and more user friendly, which is quite an accomplishment. Doesn’t make any part of booking a train ticket from A to B simple, easy or repeatable. Jan 2018 update. Just tried it again and it’s still abhorrent. It now shows you your collection references for your train journeys, which you can access by signing in. This, is a good thing. However, even though you’ve signed in, it won’t load your favourite journeys. This is a bad thing. So you have to set them up again. But, you can’t preemptively add these; you have to buy a ticket for a journey before you can add it as a favourite. Which makes no sense so this is also a bad thing. Unlike the website, you can only buy one ticket at a time, so can’t add four or five tickets to your basket, pay for them all together and get one collection reference. Instead you have to pay for each one individually and get a collection reference for each one individually. This process is made worse because it forces you to sign in again every time you press buy. Buy five tickets, sign in from scratch five times. Because having fingerprint ID or Apple Pay is clearly not good enough. Still, at least it means that if someone steals my phone and gets past the lock screen, they won’t be able to randomly buy train tickets on my account! Because I’ve deleted the app again.