Today I travelled on the Oxfordtube which is a coach service from central London to Oxford. It takes about 100 minutes and the busses are quite comfortable. On the saturday night before this morning's ride I bought a ticket online to save myself some time I thought. Turns out that even that I didn't know or notice it, I had bought a ticket for the 10:01 service from Victoria so my ticket was invalid as I boarded the 08:05 service. Thus, I had to buy another ticket or wait on by the bus stop till 10.01!
The crazy thing is, that nowhere does it say "10:01" when you buy the ticket!! Absolutely nowhere!
Another annoying thing is that the ticket you get when you buy online is a weird email with the subject line "CARD Transaction". It tells you on the website to print this page out, but since I don't have a printer at home I had to write down the Merchants ID and the Transaction ID and show these long numbers to the bus driver, who I should add, was a very polite and nice man. This is what the CARD Transaction email looked like
Here are some screenshots of what the ticket ordering system looks like on the Oxfordtube website. Can you spot where you select what time you're buying your bus ticket for?
Comments
This kind of ticketing system is now common on bus company web sites.
You usually are warned that you will need access to a printer to print you eticket as part of the paying on line process. However, I do not see these provisions on the current website nor does your screen grabs show these type of warnings / services.
You may have reserved a seat in that process specifically for a given journey. You do state you did this for a journey at 10.01am, however again, none of your screen grabs show this, so i am wondering where you/the driver got the idea of a 10.01am journey from in the first place.
My experience of the Oxfordtube bus drivers is that quite often they are given to over charging tourists by selling them tickets they may not need. I once observed a driver do this all the way out of Oxford. It's as though they are on commission to sell tickets. This would tally with your experience where they politely essentially cheat you out of your money in order to get you to buy another ticket. If i was examining the evidence you have provided i would say you were robbed. I have complained to Oxfordtube already about this practice by their drivers. But i had no repsonse.
we are not on commision for ticket sales! there are many tickets available, if we checked every persons request, if it takes 1 min extra to check there needs it would add extra 40 mins to 83(full bus) mins to the travel time.