Southern On Track 4+

If you’re planning on taking a train journey on Southern Rail, my advice is to buy a paper ticket and avoid anything more high-tech entirely. The Key Smartcard system is a fiasco, and this app is a part of the mess. It’s meant to be able to load tickets onto a card that can be read by gates at the stations. Right now I the app is telling me that I have a ticket, and that I need to load it onto my Key Smartcard before I can buy any other tickets. And yet when I get the app to detect my card (a process that is 50/50 at best), the app tells me there are no tickets available to be transferred. I’ve had many, many other problems and wasted huge amounts of time with Southern’s buggy software. The staff at the stations don’t know what to do, and the customer service teams on the phone don’t know what to do either. Everyone is polite, but everyone also acknowledges privately that the system itself is a joke. Avoid Southern if you can, and avoid this app especially.

This App really is rubbish, i was after a quick way to have a phone purchased ticket that isn’t sitting somewhere in my email. The ticket wallet section of the app crashed when attempting to login into it. When I purchased a ticket via the app, it sent an email with a link to attach the purchased ticket to my southern account, clicking that on a phone doesn’t work and I’m redirected to a purchase page. Clicking the link on a desktop links it to my southern account, then I can see it in my ticket wallet (which successfully logs in when you have a ticket??), attempting to click the ticket for I assume the barcode crashes the app. In short.. looks like I’m digging through my emails for a ticket in the morning.

Southern Rail are pushing everyone to use their smart card ‘The Key’ but make it impossible to book tickets on to it using this App. For a while it worked fine and you could could could select The Key at the start of the booking process but now that button doesn’t automatically appear. I have refresh the page, log in/log out and/or start booking a regular ticket and hope the button will appear. Occasionally it does, but most of the time it doesn’t and I have to try booking through the website instead (which often has the same problem but The Key button appears more often on this). It is becoming harder and harder to use this ‘smart’ card. PLEASE make this app easier to book The Key Tickets.