"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 16:48:39 on Mon, 30 Jun
2014, Kevin Ayton remarked:
More difficult is if you have trips to different destinations loaded
as
vouchers. Say you live in Grays and have vouchers for both Southend
and
London, because you anticipate visiting both soon (and not necessarily
knowing in which order). Which voucher should it swap for a ticket?

Order is apparently important. From
http://www.c2c-online.co.uk/customer...c2c-smart-faqs "PLEASE
NOTE: Tickets can only be used in the order in which they were
purchased".

That still doesn't help with deciding if a pax who travelled from home
(A) to work (X) on a return ticket and has just purchased a ticket from
X to B, is starting his journey to B or his return to A.

We could, of course, come up with some rules to resolve every such
conflicts, but that, I would suggest, would make user reluctance to use
such tickets reach the stratosphere

That very problem was solved with version 2.1.4 of the ITSO Technical Spec
and the changes to the specification of the TYP24 IPE - sorry to get
technical, but you don't have much option with ITSO!

Suppose you have a number of rail tickets, encoded as ITSO TYP 24 products
on you card, and you make a journey....

- at the point of initial validation (the entry gate), a list of the
potentially valid tickets on the card is written to the "Transient Ticket"
on the card.
- at subsequent valdiations - whether on train, at an intermediate
station, or at the final exit gate - that list is examined, and any
tickets that are not valid "here and now" are removed from the list.
- on final exit if the number of potentially valid tickets is 1, then we
are done. If it is zero there will be an excess or penalty to pay, with a
manual procedure to be follwed. If the number is greater than once then
again a manual procedure will be required. BUt that should only happen in
a small number of degenerate cases.

A lot of this is set out in an RSP document (RSPS3002 IIRC) which some
former colleagues mine helped to author a few years ago.

Hope that helps

It all sounds very sensible, no it really does.

Are C2C implementing this, and if so why are they disseminating
misinformation to their customers?

just because it's in the spec doesn't mean that it has found its way into
the software

tim


--
Roland Perry