How useful is that?

For the forthcoming vacation in Poland, Beloved Wife and Goat will meet Beloved Wife’s aunt and TMIL in Kraków at the end of May.

Travel between Dubai and Kraków is fussy and expensive. The Goat eventually found a reasonable deal involving flying in and out of Vienna in Austria and taking trains between Vienna and Kraków. So far so good. All booked and paid for. The Goat’s VISA card got its customary spanking.

And now the trouble starts.

RailEurope, the online rail booking service that was so keen to take nearly €400 of the Goat’s money during the booking process, discovered a problem with delivering the physical tickets. As the Goat discovered eight years ago, rail companies seem to have a great deal of difficulty getting their corporate minds around the concept of e-ticketing. “You must have an actual paper ticket in order to travel” It’s not only First Great Western, then. Does it occur to these buffoons that people who book online in advance are from Other Countries, and may find obtaining the physical tickets troublesome? Rail companies seem incapable of adjusting to passengers not simply rocking up to the booth and asking for a second-class return; departure ASAP.

To be fair, RailEurope does offer Print @ Home and Print @ Station services. But only for Eurostar and railway travel starting in France or Spain. But not from Austria.

“Allow nine days for delivery” says the website and confirmation email. So with this clock ticking, the Goat receives an email: “Dear Sir/Madam, we can’t send your tickets to a PO box because we use DHL. Please provide a physical address.”

It is well-known, although not by Rail Europe (nor various purveyors of financial and investment services, but that's another story), nothing gets successfully mailed to a physical address in the middle east. Nevertheless, the Goat wrote back with the address of the Crumbling Villa, plus a note that DHL will be quite capable of finding the place. “Just phone me for directions. Honestly; it is really easy.”

“Dear Sir/Madam, We need your postcode.”

Actually you don’t, on the very sensible grounds that there is no such thing in the middle east because there are no door-to-door mail deliveries. DHL, believe it or not, are quite capable of delivering stuff using mediocre street addresses and by phoning for directions. How else does the Goat get his bank cards?

“Dear Sir/Madam, we request you to provide us with the complete address including necessary landmarks for the same. We cannot ship the tickets until we do not [sic] get a complete address.”

The Goat sends the same information yet again, but this time includes major nearby landmarks (An international airport; a gigantic shopping mall or three; a huge mosque. The Goat speculates on the necessity of these, but they certainly do exist) and Lat/Long co-ordinates. He doesn't bother with what3words because of the blank looks whenever he's mentioned it before, nor Dubai's revolutionary Makani geolocation system that absolutely nobody seems to use.

The Goat has attempted to speak to an actual person at RailEurope, and even found the gethuman.com website. Hilariously, the 24/7 phone number results in a recorded message: “Our office hours are 0900-1930 Eastern Standard Time Monday thru Friday.”Clearly a very special interpretation of “24/7.” Special as in tasty crayons. RailEurope has, it would seem, offices in the United States and in India. One wonders if there are actually any in Europe…

One of the Goat’s friends, who visited Budapest over Christmas, had no such issues. She was able to book a stupidly cheap train ticket from Budapest to Prague using her US credit card, collect it from a machine at the railway station, and travel without fuss. So the Goat is forced to conclude that the Fates simply don’t want him ever to use rail travel, and have this time decided to steal €400 in order to make that point.

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