Chris Tolley wrote:
John Band wrote:

The original post was talking about tourists who arrived at Heathrow,
went to the HEX ticket office (ie who would have travelled on HEX
irrespective of the possible cheap fare) and were "conned into paying
for full fare tickets into London".

I would suggest these are not the people that TfL's programme was
designed to benefit, and that I don't see any reason why Londoners'
taxes should subsidise their journey into town...


I note the suggestion but disagree. If I were travelling abroad, and I
had just arrived at an airport, I doubt I would be minded to spend any
time looking for a second ticket office that might be selling more
appropriate tickets than the first one that I came to. I would expect
the first ticket office to be able to sell me what I needed without me
having to have any inside knowledge of the local situation, and I think
most real-world travellers would agree it's a reasonable expectation.

It isn't as if Londoners actually gain anything (other than a perverse
pleasure at the misfortune of others) if visitors pay more than they
need to in such circumstances as this.

Good will has to be worth something. I still remember the time I turned
up at the NIR station in Londonderry (it was on the east side of the
river, the signs on the west side all said Derry, I know I'm going to
offend someone no matter how I write the name), asked for a ticket to
Belfast, and the woman told me that a day return would be cheaper. This
was 1992.

I also recall the time (I don't remember the year) when I went to a
ticket window at Glasgow Central, asked about a train to Glasgow, and
was told the next one would leave in a couple of hours. So I waited. I
learned about the 15-minute walk to Glasgow Queen Street on a later trip.

If I'm sold a HEX ticket when a travelcard would have worked, I wouldn't
call it a ripoff (a ripoff is when a waiter in Paris tried to charge me
the menu price *plus* the prices of all the individual items); it's
more of a passive-aggressive display, somewhere between indifference and
contempt. Things can't be that bad, can they? Or was it a HEX
management decision not to tell anyone?

We don't get nearly as many tourists here in the backwaters of Colorado
as you do in the UK, but I try to be helpful when I can. When I struck
up a conversation with a New Zealander I met on the bus in Denver and
learned that he was on his way to the old location of the American Youth
Hostel, I informed him that the Hostel had moved, the original
building had been adopted by the Moonies, and perhaps he'd like
directions to the new location. It was the right thing to do.

Louis
Boulder, Colorado