"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 21:22:02 on Fri, 27 Jun
2014, tim..... remarked:

You can definitely buy tickets "online" for "tomorrow". the engine seemed
exactly the same as the SET one and that sells tickets into the future.

This was about using the ITSO purse to *pay* - how does that work online?

I didn't think we'd even established that there is an (operational) purse.

But if there is, taking the money from the purse and replacing it with a
ticket valid for X, within the "to be collected" database, doesn't seem too
technically difficult.

But my query was "can I buy a ticket that I would like to use for one day
next week but I'm not sure which day?" - to be dated the day that I pick
it up (if that is a necessary simplicity).

One way of doing that would be to have a "prepaid voucher" loaded onto the
ITSO card that gets turned into a day-ticket when you touch in. I wouldn't
want to be designing a system that allowed more than one voucher at a time
to be active.

Once again I don't think the system level design is too difficult here.

Not sure how your single ticket option will work if someone wants to make a
lunchtime journey that they didn't anticipate when they left home for work.
TBH this seems to be the only "difficult" thing that they have to consider
ATM.

Perhaps this is why they have trials. The geeks in the office don't even
bother to come up with a set of scenarios that don't work and postulate
solutions, before implementation of a trial. They just wait to see what
breaks and fix it later (no doubt to the immense inconvenience of the first
customer who tries it)

So the only "biggie" here is that you can buy (and presumably pay)
online and pick up your ticket at the gate (or not),

That's the future for ITSO, but doesn't explain what happens if you have
multiple tickets awaiting collection. Reverting to a scheme where
tickets dated "today" are only valid "today" would help, but last time
they tried that for Anytime tickets they rapidly changed it back to
"today plus three days" for the outbound leg.

I think we're back to the discussion that we had before about this being
nothing more than an electronic "paper ticket" (with online purchase
option)

That's all it is. With the added problem that if you have several
un-used tickets in your pocket, which one will the barrier decide you
want to use?

all c2c tickets seem to be "day" validity only, so that problem doesn't
apply here

They could be, but the idea is that one day ITSO will be used across the
country on routes that do have period returns. So actually it's not a very
representative pilot if the C2C line doesn't have those.

Oh I agree

No doubt there will have to be more trial operations when such a TOC does
implement it

tim