How East Coast are losing thousands every month

Because of one shoddy bug.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingythewingy/5178899845/

East Coast Rail and Failing credit cards

Like many northerners I regularly travel down south and prefer to take the train from Leeds the only real choice is East Coast Main Line, gone are the days of GNER and instead we are stuck with a nasty money pinching publicly owned disaster but this is not a rant about no more free wifi (or how you can just swap your mac address to get access) or cutting stations from the map but about their website.

East coast website is the normal place to buy advance tickets and it offers up to 20% discount on advance fares which are the only way to travel at a vaguely reasonable price. Recently at Coding Futures we have had a nightmare of a time booking tickets today I decided to experiment and work out why.

Card Declined for no reason?

We would go through the ticket flow something we have done a hundred times and put in all our details, as always the billing address details would be empty (though the card number and other bits were there) and we would populate with the office address, go through the dreaded and totally insecure 3d secure and come back to be told there was an error. A few hours later the charge will appear in the bank and within a day the bank will reverse it.

Several other cards and all the same thing, so what’s the problem?

Incorrect Billing address

In frustration I contacted their web support team I’m sure it was on the paper infront of him but the poor guy was utterly illogical telling me I had used two cards my bank was linking the two cards and using the wrong address. Strangely enough my bank has not linked my personal and corporate card and it was utter tosh but it did spark an idea.

The account I had been using, was my existing account on East Coast which had in the past had my home address what if it wasn’t my bank but East Coast who was linking the cards, easy to test so I quickly created a new account added the corporate card and as if by magic it worked. So that could be a fluke so I added my personal card (with a different address) filled in the address as normal guess what came back declined.

It would appear to not be the banks linking cards but that East Coast is ignoring what Address you have been putting in during the booking process and taking the one from the first booking of your account…

Intuitive nope, but if you have been having the same issues the solution is to create a new account for your card with your new address, while we have written and suggested strongly to East Coast the problem exists I don’t imagine it to be fixed anytime soon.