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By Martin Brampton, 18 February 2003 14:47

COMMENT There was a time when advances online put 'real world' rate of change to shame. So, asks Martin Brampton, what has gone wrong? What has happened to the internet year? You remember, people used to say that internet years were like dog years, with seven of them for every ordinary year. That was supposed to reflect the frenetic rate of change we were seeing. Nowadays, it seems to me that internet years are longer than ordinary years. Take the GNER website. I buy train tickets regularly for my journeys between London and Yorkshire, and I always 'choose' to travel with GNER because it is the only company that runs trains between London and York. Now you might think that by now, with all those internet years clocked up since online transactions first became possible, it would be easy to buy GNER tickets from their website. Oh, no, not at all. It is actually far too difficult. The first, seemingly reasonable, piece of information that is required is the date and approximate time of the outward and return journeys. You are then offered a table of some possible outward trains, with one selected as a default. For the return, a number of alternatives are listed, and for each there is a range of ticket prices. Naturally, I choose the cheapest. Commonly, that leads to another screen, which says that there are no tickets available at that price. So I try another, usually with the same result, until we get to quite high prices. Now it is quite likely that the system informs me that it was the outward journey that caused the availability problem. I can choose a different outward journey and start the whole process over again. But all this is very hit and miss, and unduly time consuming. In fact, I buy most of my tickets from Virgin's www.thetrainline.com website, which might seem odd when what I want is a GNER ticket. Happily Virgin's website is very much better than many of its train services. Given the same journey details of dates and approximate times, it provides a table of the actually available tickets at various prices for several outward and return journeys. All I have to do is pick the combination I like best. Another area in which Virgin scores over GNER is that for some unexplained reason, GNER cannot sell tickets over the internet for collection at King's Cross (or any other station). Virgin does not operate at King's Cross, so it can't offer collection there either. But it does operate at Euston, a short walk away, and therefore a reasonable alternative if the booking has been left too late to rely on the post. Mind you, Virgin's website is not perfect. Call me awkward but I like to travel in the so-called quiet coach, where mobile phones are meant to be banned. It is simple enough. Every GNER train has coach D designated as the quiet coach. Several other train operating companies provide quiet coaches too. But Virgin has not seen fit to support the option of selecting to travel in a quiet coach. Smoking and non-smoking it can manage but peace and quiet is evidently too much. And this is where we get to the crux of the internet year question. Shortly after GNER first introduced quiet coaches, a year or more ago, I asked Virgin whether their website could offer it as a choice. The answer was that it might be offered at some unspecified time in the future. The pace of the change of the Virgin website seems pretty glacial, especially if we are expecting websites to react quickly to events. GNER doesn't support selecting the quiet coach on their website either. So quite often it is full of people who did not know they were being booked in a quiet coach, and don't want to be quiet. Frequently they are not quiet, so those who wanted to be in the quiet coach complain and nobody is happy. How many internet years will it take to sort things out? Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk. For past Devil's Advocate columns see the links below, or type 'Devil' into our search engine.