JFC Travel Blog

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the only problem I had with GNER’s new online booking engine (which has continued to be used by National Express) was that it did not accept American Express. I was promptly told that support for Amex was due to be added in January and, as promised, it arrived towards the end of the month. Now I can use my preferred payment method I will use the NXEC site as my preferred method of booking tickets. I earn many thousands of miles every year through purchases with my Amex card, so I like to put as much spend on it as possible.

As there appears to be someone reading my blog from either NXEC or Atos (the creators of the site) I wonder if they could answer the following questions:

• Will the booking engine be used by other National Express rail operators such as East Anglia (one) and c2c?
• Any plans to make this available to other operators to compete with thetrainline? (National Express used to own qjump but it was merged with thetrainline and sold)
• thetrainline has affiliate links via TradeDoubler which allow webmasters to link to their site and place search boxes on their own pages. Any plans for this? Even without affiliate money some people may want to put up a NXEC search widget on their page.
• For those that Amex support isn’t enough is there any news about support for other cards such as Diners Club?

Whatever the future of this booking engine it certainly helps National Express with their aim to ‘make travel simpler‘.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Rail, GNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.