Any guesses for what chaos awaits us on this train?
Edit to add: This is not the ticket, it was printed alongside the actual ticket, after asking for seating preferences.
Not really infuriating at all.
Think of it like an airline. You have a reserved seat, but it isn’t actually allocated until you check in .
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It means you can sit anywhere you want and you’re not stuck in an assigned seat.
You get on the train early you can have any seat you want.
This seems like the exact opposite of infuriating.Any seat you want
Provided that someone doesn’t have a specific seat booked.
Then why do you also need this piece of paper that doesn’t even seem to function as a ticket?
My money is on it being part of the ticketing computer’s programming.
They only issue as many tickets as seats. They just don’t tell you what seat to take.
They only issue as many tickets as seats
That’s… optimistic, but we can be hopeful.
Read the full text. This, despite appearances, is not in itself a ticket.
In my experience it should be called general seating or something along those lines if it isn’t for a specific reserved seat.
I’m not familiar with the ticketing system, but I think that it’d be reasonable for the ticket to simply be used to ensure that there is a seat somewhere, but not a specific seat.
If you go to a restaurant and reserve a table, the table doesn’t need to be a specific one…just means that the restaurant will make sure that one is open.
This ticket is odd by UK standards, and the arrangement you describe isn’t the norm. These seat reservation tickets normally specify a particular seat
Great western railway operates like this, offering you a “mystery seat” regardless of whether they’ve sold 120% of the seats in the train.
Every east-midlands train I’ve been on has had to cancel specific seat reservations when I got on anyway. I think they just constantly overbook or something.
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So many people in the comments don’t get that having something called a seat reservation which doesn’t literally reserve a seat is mildly infuriating.
I think people answering these comments are from other countries that don’t understand that on a train from Reading to London in rush hour, there might be 60 seats and 80 passengers per carriage. 20 of these pax standing despite their ticket that said “Feel free to sit on any free seat you happen to find!”
I’m reading some of these replies thinking I’m getting gaslighted by railway operator employees. Unless they actually sell “absolutely no sitting” tickets and the conductors fine abusers, this ticket makes no sense.
It just says no “specific” seat reserved but you’ll have a seat reserved, you just don’t know which one. It’s good if you can get there early and get a window seat.
That’s a good example of not understanding, thanks!
+1. “oh you’ll surely be good if you are early, the train can’t possibly already be overcrowded when it arrives”
Now you have to find out who is sitting without a reservation!
My guess is that it printed this “null” reservation slip to let you know that the reservation had failed, because otherwise people would think that the printer wasn’t working? It prints the ticket(s), then the reservation(s), then the receipt listing how many things were printed.
Fairly common in Germany. Trains can be so full often times that people are standing butt to belly in the aisles.
In the UK where this ticket is from, if you buy a ticket from the machine in the station it will spit it out in potentially multiple parts (because one isn’t enough space for all the information)
You can see this ticket says “Valid only with Travel Ticket”, which means this is the second of two parts. The “Travel Ticket” (not pictured) is the one that actually allows you to travel on the train, and the seat reservation part (pictured) is the one that gives you a seat.
Normally the machine only gives what you need, so if there is no seat reservation you’ll get the travel ticket only.
So the mystery isn’t that there is no reserved seat, but that because there is no seat, this ticket doesn’t even need to exist. The machine could have just not printed this ticket at all.
Thanks for the clarification!
You see, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation: the holding.
“Specific.” It’s general admission. Ideally, they would only sell as many seat reservations as there are seats available in whatever cars are in the “seat pool.”
I don’t see a problem here.
I suppose it’s irritating that you pay (a likely large amount of money as it’s probably a UK ticket) for a ticket with a seat reservation, the least they could do is actually assign you a seat.
If it’s a free for all and - as you likely correctly say - they don’t oversell the number of tickets against the number of seats, then the reservation card of the ticket is a little pointless really.
You’ve reserved A seat.
Except you haven’t, that’s the point.
If you don’t get to the train early, you have to stand. That’s how British trains work. People who get to the train will see many seats unreserved saying “Seat Available” on the overhead sign, regardless of whether they’ve reserved a seat.
So someone who hasn’t clicked “reserve a seat” on the booking process might sit on that, while you stand in the hallway.
The ticket literally means “sorry, you don’t have a seat assigned”.
But you are permitted to sit. Just the seat you find is not defined.
Yes, but which one?
Who cares? Some airlines do this too. You just get a boarding group, and pick your own seat
Do they still give you a boarding pass, and a seperate piece of paper stating that you have a reservation, but does not in itself act as a reciept nor boarding pass?
Also, that example is bad to begin with, because airlines will oversell their planes ALL THE TIME. Spirit and Fronteer literally try to oversell every single plane on purpose. The idea being that they can try to convince you to get reimbursed with Fronteer bucks. A fictional currency that is only good within their company and has no outside real world value. Then they hope that you take it, and then later that currency expires. Meaning in the end you paid for an airline ticket that you never used and have no recoarse to get refunded.
It’s likely to differentiate between the general admission cars and the cars that do have assigned (and probably more comfortable) seats.
Seems reasonable enough to me if you bought a ticket for a train which doesn’t have assigned seating, which is pretty common. Just choose your seat as you board the same way you would with a bus.
Yeah but why even give you the checkbox/option for reserving a seat, only to tell you that you might actually be standing if the train is full or you don’t arrive early enough?
I suspect the sales website can’t actually reserve seats itself, but just passes along the request to some other system, which enters “LOL, NO!” in that field for a train that was long-since fully booked.
I’m guessing that they have limited seats and are trying to make sure no one has to stand on the train by limiting the number of reservations, even if which seat to sit in is not assigned. In Japan, bullet trains and some express services require extra payment with your ticket or pre-booking, for either non-reserved or reserved class.
Certain tickets in German rail have similar reservations. There are numerous seats kept free in the train for those who have a reservation - simply find one of these seats and sit down there. Always worked fine for me.
