letter to London Midland: The process for changing tickets i

To: comments@londonmidland.com
Subject: The process for changing tickets is unreasonably difficult
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I purchased a ticket online through londonmidland.com (booking reference: 1527103). Although I do have an account, it seems I didn't log in at the time, so the ticket is not in my purchase history on the online account.

The confirmation email I got didn't mention the time of the train, a very basic oversight, so I had to call up your web support to find out the time of the train I'd booked. I might well have turned up to the station expecting I could travel at any time on that day, so this should definitely be fixed ASAP, although this is not the actual subject of my current complaint.

I wanted to change the time of one of my return ticket. I am aware that there is a £10 charge for this. So I asked the gentleman in web support if I could do this over the phone.

He told me that was not possible, there is no way to change this ticket over the phone and since I didn't book through a logged in account there is also no way to change the ticket online. I asked if I could do it in a London Midland ticket office, and he told me, no that was also not possible.

He said the only way to change the ticket is to purchase a new one and then mail both tickets in to your office afterwards, which seems like an incredibly cumbersome process for a simple task which all other rail companies I have encountered let you simply do over the phone.

It also doesn't add up, because I've previously tried to change a ticket that I'd already collected at the ticket office, and I was told that because I'd printed the ticket I couldn't get a refund at all. Which I accepted at the time, but now that I learn this it seems like I was simply cheated out of a considerable amount of money.

Could you please clarify the situation for me? Because at the moment this seems like a pretty dodgy way of cheating your customers out of their right to change their tickets by putting a particularly high admin burden on the customer. I also believe you've already cheated me out of at least one refund I was entitled to, where I have instead had to pay for the ticket twice.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
Robin Winslow Morris