Poor intuitiveness on the Irish Rail website

[Urban_Form]

What is the story with the Irish rail website?

Somebody asks me about fares for Dart services from Connolly to Howth so I figure I'll check online.

So I go to www.irishrail.ie and notice that you can't find ticket prices unless you want to make a reservation - this is proper odd I thought, but whatever... its Irish Rail after all.

So I enter Howth and Connolly as my departure and destination point - all good at this stage, "next". A list of services pops up and I'm prompted to select which train I want to reserve a seat on - I'm thinking "any" at this stage because all I want to do is find out the cost of the fare. So I "proceed to reservation" and here I get some non-descript error message.

I'm thinking okay, this is the Dart so there's no such thing as reservations. I'm still no closer to figuring out Dart fares.

I go back to the Irish Rail homepage and search for a link that maybe I missed the first time... then I notice a link at the bottom "Commuter Ticket Sales", this must be it I figured but then the link takes me onto the Ticketmaster website where I'm being prompted to choose between a weekly or monthly ticket.

This is not what I want. I try www.cie.ie and the only link I can find that possibly relates to Dart is the link to the Irish Rail homepage - having ended up nowhere on www.irishrail.ie before there's no point in trying again.

It's only then that it occurred to me perhaps there's a www.dart.ie - ah success. It took me ten minutes to get this information when it should have only taken one or two. It's like as far as CIE is concerned online the Dart just doesn't exist. So frustrating

[Mark Gleeson]

You might want to try the Luas site, it used to have a fare calculator but its been missing its a challenge even to find the station list

There is a internal power struggle in IE as to who owns the website so thats why there are 2, www.dart.ie jsut points to a page on the second site

The error message on the IE site is fairly reasonable, in order to proceed at least one reservable leg of your journey must be selected. If you try to reserve a DART journey you should get a error dialog stating bookings not possible for that combination of stations, if you hit cancel and try again it lets you move to the select train page

Why bother we have both online http://www.platform11.org/passenger_info/

[wwhyte]

Originally Posted by Mark Gleeson

The error message on the IE site is fairly reasonable, in order to proceed at least one reservable leg of your journey must be selected.

If you mean the error message is reasonably informative, I agree.

If you mean that it's a reasonable error to give, I disagree. You should be able to book a ticket online and go to the station and print it out. And if all you want to do is find the fare you should be able to do that.

Maybe the best solution would be simply to display the fares on the page before you "proceed to reservation".

[MrX]

I think the Irish rail website's way too complex for what it does. They could do a lot by just simplyfing the booking process!

[Mark Gleeson]

We use the booking system to get quotes since we know it does that for certain journeys. For someone to assume that by selecting reservations that they will be quoted a a fare for a suburban journey is unreasonable, it doesn't say fares it says reservations

The anywhere to anywhere fare quotation widget has been promised but not delivered

Now what should happen is the error box pops up stating that reservations not permitted for the specified combination of stations, I've seen it pop up a few times

Funny thing is put dart fares into google...............

[CharlieBranch]

I think the website is a big improvement from what used to be there and to be fair to IE I think they tried to put out an informative/user friendly website but just didn't think it through properly.

For a start there's no site map. I've my machine on 1024x768 resolution and I still have to scroll down to see what's at the bottom of the homepage.

It's better than its predecessor but still needs some work.

[wwhyte]

Originally Posted by Mark Gleeson

For someone to assume that by selecting reservations that they will be quoted a a fare for a suburban journey is unreasonable, it doesn't say fares it says reservations

I think you're being too kind to them. It's reasonable to expect that a transport site tells you basic information about how to use that transport, including the fares.