Every now and then I'd like to buy a ticket online when I am traveling, for a theater play, for a bus ride, for the next train trip, a museum ticket, etc. The difficult thing that is a showstopper sometimes is that you never know how to convert the virtual ticket to a real ticket afterwards. The good old way is to print out something and to present it somewhere, something that is not really feasible when you travel and don't have a printer you can use nearby. Some offer to send you a text (SMS) but they don't tell you in advance if that works with a foreign SIM card, too. Some offer a code to present, some work with your name and presenting the credit card, some send you a 2D bar code that you have to present on paper, others are progressive and allow it to be shown on the mobile phone, etc. etc. Quite a chaos, really. Some more thought around how foreigners can buy a product visiting the country and clear information before the sales process of how the real product can be collected afterwords would be really good.
2 thoughts on “Buy Tickets Online – Abroad And Without A Printer”
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There are a few companies trying to address this … One way is to send a txt, that links to a personalized mobile web page. Once on screen it can be presented as the ticket or even scanned if required. Of course the scanning requires a certain level of phone to assure the screen resolution is high enough.
Totally agreed. I wish they would make use of QR codes for ticketing somehow, its such a cool technology!