10% loyalty discount?
 

For the past several weeks, every time I make a booking, the following message is included in the booking confirmation:

Iarnród Éireann wish to thank you for your loyal custom. We note that you have made several bookings with us on www.irishrail.ie and would therefore like to advise you that on your next booking of any value, we will be discounting the total cost by 10%.

Needless to say, none of the subsequent bookings were discounted by this 10%. Anyone know what's going on??

similar to the bé Club recently launched by Bus Éireann I guess (though loyalty points have been available with BÉ prior to this and the BÉ 10% discount for tickets booked online is running approx a few years)

Only for people on routes where tickets can be bought online :-/

Bus Eireann's setup is merely to reduce the cash onboard, there is no booking, guaranteed seat etc plus it has some weird restrictions, you must have a printout of the booking with you being able to recite the booking reference code is not sufficent

The Irish Rail system is a booking system so you can get up to 93% off if you choose wisely, but can easily get 40% off a single journey.

So its cheaper from Rosslare to Dublin by rail then by bus if you book with Irish Rail

That's because the driver's ticket machine thinks he's after selling a ticket for cash when you redeem an online ticket. He needs something to hand in to his cash office, and the printout is that something.

From a user point of view its pain in the ass if you use a mobile device to book. Given the code has gone into the machine there is an audit trail already.

Its not a booking in the true sense

Essentially I suppose we could term it a ticket purchase - one can buy the tickets but, with the exception of Eurolines, it's not journey specific and doesn't reserve or guarantee accommodation for you on a bus. The eight digit MAC number is the link.

For bookings made via a mobile device it would be a good idea if BÉ allowed you to show a particular screen snap with the MAC number and details. The problem is that the driver then has no record but this can be overcome quickly by quickly jotting down the details. Sometimes when using an online ticket I notice the driver will write down the actual ticket number on my e-mail printout. Other times not.

BÉ online ticketing was introduced prior to the widespread installation of onboard CCTV. Traditionally onboard security has never been a major issue on provincial buses and less so now with CCTV monitoring both the interior and exterior of vehicles.

It is indeed a nuisance printing out an A4 sheet and for the driver the online tickets involve a fair bit of work at the end of his/her duty.

One can buy a ticket from a rural hamlet such as Grangebellew into Drogheda online but not buy tickets for journeys between several major towns and I won't even begin talking about the lack of cross-border online ticketing (the sole exception to my knowledge is the jointly-operated X2/200 where Journey-specific ticketing from en route points in the North to Dublin Airport/Dublin can be booked online with Translink).

Plus the very steep fares and absence of day return tickets on several cross-border coach journeys between major towns in the swathe of the NW and border counties that are rail-less.

The MAC number is just a checksum for the origin, destination, ticket type, and date, which is why you can do same-day bookings. Drivers' ticket machines aren't synchronized, they just put a module (effectively a memory card) into a networked machine when they book on and that module goes into their ticket machine.

I'm sure if they thought about it for a while they could get around the requirement to have the booking on paper however.