Yesterday morning, about 6:15am, I purchased a season ticket on Southern's website.  Main reason was to use a ^25 voucher I had sitting on my account.  Selected "London Waterloo" from the drop-down list to collect my ticket.  Subsequently looking at the site, it says these tickets can only be collected from "Southern stations", but makes no attempt to define what one of these are and then gives a big drop-down list of all ToD enabled stations from which one can select Waterloo.

About 8:30, collect the ticket from the TVM^▸ (Ticket Vending Machine).  All good, until I was walking down to the Underground station when I noticed this.....


Yes, -1 day of validity.  Plus no photocard number, no "Travelcard" in the orange header and ticket type should be "TRVLCD-00M07D" not "TRAVELCARD 7".

Back up to the ticket office.  Queue for a few minutes to be told by a rather unhelpful lady that I must have selected the wrong date online.  I tried three times explaining what the problem was, but she simply couldn't see the issue.  Told me to phone whoever I bought it from.

Not very satisfactory.  Off I head to the advance ticket sales counter as they tend to be more helpful.  This guy was much more interested and spotted the problem straight away.  He knew straight away that I'd bought this from Southern as it is a common problem, apparently.  He attempted to put it though as a damaged ticket for a replacement, but couldn't do this until the first day of validity.  Fair enough.  But my train on Monday departs at 0647 yet the ticket office doesn't open until 0645.

Head off to work, now arriving 20 minutes late.  First thing I do is phone up Southern.  Took about 25 minutes.  Was asked to send over a picture of the ticket and they'd credit e-vouchers to my account.  Seemed ok, I could just buy the ticket again and collect it from Victoria on the way home.

Come 4pm and still no sign of the vouchers.  This time, I spent 45 minutes on the phone, including holding time.  He said that the vouchers had been credited but it would take several hours for them to appear.  Not a great solution, so he offered ^10 extra vouchers.  I almost laughed at him for this.  I didn't want more vouchers, just a train ticket that I could use on Monday morning, not a ^130 piece of useless orange cardboard.

The vouchers weren't credited still.  A typical "grumpy customer" Tweet to Southern and surprisingly the vouchers were credited within the hour, but I was already out of "Southern territory" by this point.  My local stations aren't Southern operated.  So the dilemma was to buy a new ticket and be ^130 out of pocket until my next online purchase in two weeks time or get to a Southern station to collect it.  Opted for the latter, using my current season ticket to go to Emsworth, a round-trip of over an hour, including the time taken to get to Havant by car.

Overall, an incredibly poor experience.  I spent over three hours trying to get this fixed, all for a paltry ^10 voucher.  Had the vouchers not been credited by Monday, I wouldn't have had any second thoughts about travelling on this dodgy looking ticket and forwarding any Penalty Fares/Excess Fares/Oyster^▸ (Smartcard system used by passengers on Transport for London services) journeys to Southern.

Worth complaining formally?  The website is incredibly unclear and offers no explanation to what a "Southern station" actually is.

How on earth can a computer system create and then print off a ticket which expires the day before it starts? However long it is supposed to be for! 

With my programmer hat on, I did wonder how on earth someone could program something that would allow this to be issued.  If I were writing this, the first thing I'd do is ensure there was an if statement ensuring the expiry date is equal to or greater than the start date.  It would only need a few lines of code.

I've written a brief letter to Southern, summarising what happened and what I'd like done.  I don't want compensation, just confirmation that changes are put into place to ensure this does not happen to anyone else.  Specifically, I've asked for their website to be made clearer and have the list of stations reduced down to just Southern ones for these tickets.  Not exactly a difficult change for them to make, lets see if it ever happens.

I also have a programmer hat and that is basic coding.. that is the sort of thing that might happen in a test environment, but not in live..

I've encounted similar but not quite so rediculus issue. I've booked an Arriva 'club 55 website' ticket for my grandmother a couple of times. These are supposed to have 8-days validity (at least for the return leg) but when collected at Manchester Piccadilly the ticket machine prints it as a day return and we've had to wait while the ticket desk staff think about it (for a long while) then stamp the back to prove the ticket machines can't handle issuing that type of ticket properly.