Every Eid it feels like getting a train ticket has become a competition.
You log in before the tickets are released, wait for the exact time, search for your route, and then suddenly most of the seats are gone.
I've personally been thinking about whether there is a better way to handle this.
A friend and I are working on an idea where someone could set their journey preferences beforehand date, route, train, class, seat preference, etc and an automated assistant would try to find a suitable seat through the person's own railway account when tickets become available.
If a seat is found, the user would still make the payment themselves through the railway's payment process.
We're specifically trying to avoid the whole ticket-reselling/scalping model. The idea is to help an individual get their own ticket, rather than buying tickets in advance and selling them.
But before going further, I wanted to ask people who actually use the railway:
Would you trust something like this?
And more importantly:
- What would make you uncomfortable about giving a service access to your railway account?
- Would you prefer completely manual booking?
- What safeguards would you expect?
- What do you think is the biggest problem with the current online ticketing experience?
I'm genuinely looking for criticism here. If you think this is unnecessary or a bad idea, I'd like to hear that too.
Full disclosure: I'm working on the idea myself, so I'm not completely neutral. 😅