As the bmi forum seems to be the unofficial UK trains forum, people might be interested in this. Random pop-ups on the regular Virgin Trains website invite you to try out

https://www.buytickets.virgintrains.co.uk

and send feedback to [email protected]

I'm afraid my feedback to Virgin ended up being rather lengthy, so I doubt they will read it. As well as telling them what I thought of the new-style presentation -- not much -- I couldn't resist telling them what was wrong that they hadn't fixed:

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Problems with the new site:

- It's really hard now to see which trains have the lowest Value fares. Previously, the tabular layout made it easy to see what was available when. The previous format was logical and intuitive.

- On the example, I looked at, I was presented with only four fare types per train, so I can't see what a fare might rise to if the lower Value fares sell out before I book or if I've already missed out on lower Value fares and might therefore want to check other dates to see when they are still available.

- When clicking on a fare category in the "Ticket Categories" box, the javascript that runs doesn't actually do anything. However, I can click on the fare categories next to each train.

- In the fare conditions, the words "admin fee" appear where "£5" should appear.

- Several times, when backing up to modify an enquiry, I got the message "Due to technical issues we have been unable to process your request. Please go back and try again."

It seems to me that you've taken away the one thing that was good about the existing site -- its tabular presentation -- and not addressed any of the other major problems. [Actually, I see you still retain the tabular approach for shorter journeys for which Cheap Day Returns are available. This means that users are going to be presented with two entirely different displays depending on the journey. I can't think of anything more likely to confuse users.]

Problems/limitations of the existing site which I wish you would fix instead:

- When you do a subsequent enquiry, there's no means of unchecking a radio button. So if for example you've used the "via" option, you can't clear it on a subsequent enquiry.

- From experience, I'd say up to half of the seat reservations on any given train are not occupied by the person who made the reservation. I know that I rarely occupy the seat I've been assigned. Reasons for this are: (i) I buy a flexible ticket and don't travel on the train I booked; (ii) you've seated me in the quiet coach and I want to use my phone; (iii) I'm travelling with some one else who has a seat reservation elsewhere on the train; (iv) there are other seats available in a better position..

Therefore, why not let people specify, after selecting their trains, what their seating preferences are, and assign accordingly? If people have booked a flexible ticket, please provide the option of modifying the booking later and updating the seat reservation.

- Many of my journeys are not straightforward A-to-B-to-A journeys. Often I want to stopover in a third station (that is valid for the route) on the outbound, but not necessarily on the return. Websites like DeutscheBahn's allow stopover stations and stopover times to be specified. This is incredibly useful. Also, open-jaw journeys such as Nuneaton-London-Birmingham would be very useful to me, as Nuneaton is closed at weekends for West Coast trains for most of the year. I know I can book two one-way journeys, but (a) on some routes, the Standard Open Return costs less than two Standard Open Singles, and (b) it doesn't help me for Virgin Traveller bookings.

- It's particularly frustrating that I have to go to www.bahn.co.uk to find out the full journey of any British train showing all of its calling points. I'm frequently on trains from Nuneaton on the West Coast mainline, and colleagues are going to join me at a subsequent station, so I need to know if my train is going to be calling at Stafford, Tamworth, Lichfield, Rugby, etc. What would be enormously helpful is if up-to-date timetables could be available on the website as pdf documents in the same format as that used in the National Rail Timetable book.

- Only a maximum of five trains are displayed for each segment, and clicking on "earlier/later trains" takes forever. (Also, if you back up, it confuses the "earlier/later" function.) Why can't more journeys be displayed? We all have bigger screens these days, or are capable of horizontal scrolling.

- Some times -- and I've just seen this happen on your new site too -- fares don't always show as available when they are. Refreshing usually solves the problem. I've just tried Newcastle to Birmingham at 10:00 on 9th Feb, and the first class value fare appeared on all services the first time I tried (as well as five other fare types). A few seconds later, I repeated the query, and all first class values fares had disappeared. I tried it again, and they were all back.

- When you ask for details of a specific train, there is no differentiation between Virgin West Coast and Virgin Cross Country; they just say "Virgin Trains". Given that many ticket types specify that they are valid on Cross Country only (for example), and given that the first-class service on these trains is completely different, this is completely unhelpful. I frequently find myself travelling from Stafford to Manchester for example with no idea who the operator is until the train arrives.

- It would also be very useful to select trains by Train Operating Company. If I'm travelling from Nuneaton to London, I really don't want to see Silverlink services for example.

- The system is far too picky about the spelling of station names. For example, BURTON-ON-TRENT has to entered exactly like that. You'd think that "BURTON" alone, or variations of ON/UPON with/without the hyphens would be sufficient information. I've also found that the spelling required by the Virgin website does not always match that required by www.nationalrail.co.uk -- an example is "EDINBURGH" which is accepted as Edinburgh's central railway station by the National Rail site, but on Virgin's you have to know that it is "EDINBURGH WAVERLEY".

- The site frequently fails to display the lowest prices for a journey. If a journey involves a change of trains and travel on two different Train Operating Companies, it's usually the case that the cheapest non-flexible ticket is obtained by pricing the segments separately, but the website fails to do this. This leads to the added problem that the passenger is forced to buy two separate tickets, meaning they have no legal protection if the trains misconnect.