Cvander:

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I'm an Entrepreneur, founder of Maestros del Web. Why do I blog in English?

Renfe, you can do better

Another story of how sometimes it becomes inconvenient to use some online reservation systems.

I used to bought train tickets in the Spanish Renfe online system. They even sent you an SMS message with your booking number and you’re ready to go.

Well, they upgraded their system and now when you book online, as a last step you get a webpage to print the boarding pass. And now to get on board, it’s mandatory to show it. My only trouble was that I didn’t have a printer, so I had a pending visit to an internet coffee shop.

So, I went to one of those coin operated internet places where you get the chance to remember good old times with Internet Explorer and Windows Server… something… haha…
I accessed my email account to check for the order confirmation and there was no link to the boarding pass, and they insisted that the email wasn’t a travel document.
I went to Renfe website to try to generate the boarding pass again, but I couldn’t find the option.Just some nice advertising about the new machines to print your passes in the stations that will be available in Barcelona soon. I printed the email and showed up in the station.

They did let me take the train, but I got a warning that next time I might not be that lucky and could miss the train. I did try and it seems like they forgot to be more nice to their paying customers.

Published: 05/02/2008. Cats: It happened to me, Viajes.

2 comments »

1

Opinión by jachguate

February 21, 2008 @ 6:05 pm

A lot of (bad designed) systems have this kind of performance :(

For that situations, I have installed in every computer I use often a copy of the free edition of CutePDF Writer, who installs a fake printer who generates the output as pdf.

You will always find a way to print the generated pdf later, even sending it as an email to a friend with a real printer :D

Of course it will be better if every system in the world take all the situations in account, but is a good solution until that time :D

2

Opinión by Rudy

February 25, 2008 @ 2:10 pm

Jachguate, Christian owns a Mac and thus it does not need CutePDF since the Mac OS uses the PDF engine natively to render the screen and print out. At any print dialog you can pick to preview it (native PDF viewer) or to save it as PDF.

Your suggestion to print the ticket into a PDF document is very good and Christian should have known better. He could have carried the PDF to print or to show it to the train people. Good recommendation.

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