We’ve pointed out in the past errors in the rail industry websites here and here. They’re happy to overcharge you, and to claim explicitly and wrongly that the quoted price is the correct one.

We have just discovered a new fault in the new-ish Southeastern ticket site. On Easter Monday it would not sell off-peak return tickets for late evening returns (at or after 2100), selling two off-peak singles instead.

Moreover the website says that “the best value” would be two single tickets costing £23.20 – when the correct fare would be an Off-Peak Day Return costing £11.70. That’s overcharging by 98%.

When we pointed this out to Southeastern they said:

@SevenoaksRailTA Hi, We are aware of this bug with the website and we are working with our development team on this. ^PR

— Southeastern (@Se_Railway) March 28, 2016

We don’t think that this is acceptable:

• if there is a known bug in the website then customers should be warned before they buy a ticket. For Southeastern not to do so means that they are knowingly overcharging their customers. Not taking immediate action to warn customers (or perhaps taking the site down completely) is unacceptable.
• there’s no indication of urgency in fixing the bug – “working with” sounds like overcharging is not considered a serious problem.
• there’s no promise to contact everyone who overpays (remember, you have to give your email address) and reimburse them.
• Southeastern should test its computer systems for accuracy before putting them live – there’s no excuse for not doing so when money is involved.

In the meantime we would suggest not buying the ticket through the Southeastern website unless you are sure what the correct fare should be and you can get it to offer it to you. Some other websites do better and you can still pick the ticket up at Sevenoaks. For instance the Chiltern Railways site (which seems to use the same system as Southeastern used to use):

Update 1000 29 March 2016: The mis-selling of tickets is continuing – and it applies to off-peak day return journeys from Tonbridge and from Maidstone East as well as from Sevenoaks. It occurs if the return journey time is specified as 2100 or later. In fact, if you continue with the transaction, the “return” single is dated for the next day – so it is not even valid for the train that you specified!

Update 2300 29 March 2016: After our emails to Southeastern during the day, they have added a warning box to their website. At least this acknowledges that there is a problem. And although by default the National Rail Enquiries website redirects customers back to Southeastern to purchase the ticket, the NRE website appears to tell the Southeastern website the right ticket to issue.

We haven’t been given a timescale for fixing the website.

Update 0800 30 March 2016: Between 0700 and 0800 the warning message disappeared from the Southeastern website. This morning our test cases for Sevenoaks, Tonbridge and Maidstone East all now produce the correct fares for same-day off-peak journeys to London returning after 2100. Although we have not heard from Southeastern, the software may have been fixed overnight.

Update 0800 31 March 2016: Southeastern has confirmed that the problem has been fixed.