Virgin Trains East Coast and the simple refund process

Sometimes, you just make a mistake on a booking and need a refund. People who regularly piece together a travel itinerary for themselves on the Internet are certainly not immune to this. Luckily Virgin Trains East Coast make this easy.

Recently I made a booking for a short train trip, making use of the advance purchase rules to get a ticket for £6.00. As soon as I confirmed the booking, I realised I had booked the wrong day. A rookie mistake!

Virgin Trains East Coast Refund

A quick look around the Virgin Trains East Coast web page showed that I could cancel a ticket online. If I cancelled within two hours and made a new booking, the original ticket would be refunded to me. Of course, I did that.

Slightly sceptical about the whole thing – after all, it was my first time – I waited to see what would happen. A couple of days later came two e-mails confirming the refund had been processed.

Seamless Virgin Flair

When it comes to almost all dealings with Virgin, they have a certain casually familiar tone. An example is the e-mail header saying “The money’s in the bag”. It certainly beats a boring old “Refund Approved” or something like that.

A nice reassuring “All sorted” image is included at the top of the e-mails which I quite liked. Once I received the e-mails, it took three more days for the money to hit my account, which is less than the “up to 5 days” promised in the e-mail.

Overall Thoughts

Online services that just work always please me immensely. If you’re going to have people do things themselves, it should be simple and effective and that is what I found with the Virgin Trains East Coast system.

Virgin Trains East Coast lost the franchise on 23 June 2018, so it will be some other entity running these services for the next while. Virgin Trains still have their West Coast service though, so the good service should continue.

Have you had any good or bad online system experiences? Thanks for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Stephen Craven via Wikimedia Commons