Renfe website fails

After travelling down to Valencia to see Arctic Monkeys on Saturday night I needed to get back home to Barcelona yesterday and since I’d had a problem getting a train ticket for the journey down, so travelled by bus instead, I decided to book on the Renfe website.

First of all I tried at about 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. However the booking engine appeared to have crashed. So, Sunday morning I booted up a laptop and tried to book online.

Although the booking engine didn’t actually crash, it didn’t actually do anything either – I was unable to book so I reserved my ticket by phone – phew, one part of their reservation system actually works, they even sent  a text message with my confirmation number.

Arriving 15 minutes before the train was due to depart I confidently strolled up to a ticket machine and inserted the credit card I’d used to book the ticket. Nothing happened, and then my friend pointed out that there was a message telling people NOT to insert their credit card until they had entered their confirmation code. DOH!

Luckily the problem that I couldn’t get my card out of the machine was swiftly resolved thanks to my trusty Swiss Army Knife. However, we now needed to speak to someone, time was running out and the queue was a few too long for my liking.

Luckily Graham jumped in and went up to a window that was closed. When they told him to join the queue he told them it was urgent because the confirmation code didn’t work in the machines one of them was good enough to print out a ticket for me – that kind of attitude is, unfortunately rare in Spain.

After that I boarded the train and the journey was without further incident. But it does illustrate how far Spain has to go with ecommerce.

I was thinkiing about the problem and decided it must be something to do with Internet Explorer versus Firefox – I’d been using a Mac with Firefox. However, I’ve just tried booking tickets on Renfe in both Firefox and IE7 – and IE7 fails very early on, but it does APPEAR to be working with Firefox on Windows XP, although since I don’t actually need a ticket I’m not going to enter my credit card details.

But the question remains… do they actually make ANY sales from the Renfe website?

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