Great Western Railway 4+

For individual purchases (1 person, 1 ticket, 1 phone) I guess this is an improvement. However for more than 1 person travelling in a group this is useless. Although the App allows you to buy multiple tickets (and add a Railcard if applicable) the automatic gate will only allow 1 person through at a time. The official solution (given by GWR) appears to be for the lead passenger to go through the barrier then start passing their phone backwards and forwards across the barrier to let other members of the party through !!!! Or you can call a member of staff, explain the situation and they will let you through - which negates the whole purpose of an automated system. I can’t believe such a straightforward system could have been implemented so badly. Solution would be to allow a lead passenger to transfer e-tickets to other members of their party.... oh and allow e-tickets to be stored in their Apple Wallet (which I believe it doesn’t do). Huge fail GWR 👎🏻😞

For an iPhone app that it lacks wallet and Apple Pay Integration. Instead you are forced to use a credit card entry screen which may look good on a web browser on a laptop but clearly doesn’t work in a phone. And as for the E ticket well it’s an idea they haven’t actually implemented in any way considered usable.

I also want to highlight that some of its bookings come out wrong. Specifically I just ordered three adults one with a Railcard to London and back, but actually getting the tickets it turns out that the Railcard feature was ignored. At least knowing how bad the group tickets were handled I opted to get the tickets printed out at the station, so I can now go to the ticket office and talk about refunds and replacement. No idea about what would happen if you wanted to do the same for an E ticket. in their favour, unlike Trainline, they don’t charge you extra booking and ticket printing fees.

When people cover the failings of rail privatisation, the explosion in mediocre railway line websites that even worse applications, and the inability to get refunds from stations run by different suppliers and never covered. But every time you try to book a ticket you hit the consequences of bad decisions made by John Major and his cabinet

This app often leaves me waiting at the barriers, or waiting when I need to show my ticket, as it “busy wheels” for 10-15 seconds when I try to view my tickets. These are tickets that I’ve already viewed in the app to make sure they are there. What on earth is it doing?
Another problem is that old tickets often remain in the app after I have already completed the journey. I currently have 3 old tickets in “travel for today “ section.
Finally, the UI for this app could be improved. The first time I used it, it took me a while to find my ticket for travel, since when you select the Tickets option at the bottom it takes you to the page for buying tickets. Only after a while did I notice amongst all the options for buying a ticket there was a button to view already purchased tickets. Surely if you run the app around the time of a train that you have a ticket for, it should go straight to showing that ticket?