This is because those clever Oyster card people, who have been paid millions of pounds to implement pay as you go functionality for London’s trains, can’t figure out how to deal with journeys where part of the journey is covered by the season ticket, and part by pay as you go.

Imagine you’re travelling from Wimbledon (Zone 3) to Waterloo (Zone 1) and you have a season ticket for Zones 2 and 3. The intuitive thing would be for the journey past the end of Zone 2 (which happens to be at Vauxhall) to be deducted from your pay as you go balance. What seems to happen, though, is that the cost of the whole journey is deducted: meaning you’re paying twice for the portion covered by your season ticket.

Surely this is a bit of elementary software development. I’d be happy for anyone on my team to code something that would do the trick. I may well add a question about this to my recruitment test for developers. TFL, the Oyster card people, have come up with a ridiculous work-around though: the Oyster Extension Permit. So when I plan to travel from my season ticket area to another area, I have to get another ticket so that I don’t get ripped off. Sadly, the machines at my station can’t even issue this permit, as they don’t sell Oyster card tickets.

Most people won’t notice, though, because Oyster card users only get statements online if they buy credit online, and very few people can therefore see where their online credit has disappeared to.

What was a lot more interesting was visiting this exhibition at the weekend, where artists have created spaces that evoke what their minds feel like to them. A lot more satisfying and engaging. I loved the parcel-tape cave system created by Thomas Hirschhorn.

Or you can go back to Twitter, for a quick fix of rather less substance.

For an offer to succeed, it doesn’t just have to be good, it has to be relevant to the recipient, either because they generally buy the product or service being offered, or because they are looking for it at that time. I’m very unlikely to go out and hire a car I didn’t need just because someone is promoting them.

I wonder what the offer’s conversion rate was?

• Is desperate to get their customers to check in online?
• Changes booked seats (checked in online) at the departure gate, so that people who didn’t bother to check in online can be kept seated together?
• Markets exhaustively and expensively to independent travellers, to maximise their yield by cutting out agents and tour operators?
• Oversells a 747-300 by 22 seats, and has the same situation on every flight on that route for the next 3 months?
• Lies about a smaller plane having been sent (and by the way, what plane do most airlines have that is bigger than a 747-300?) so there aren’t enough seats?
• Prioritises the customers of agents and tour operators over independent travellers (who bought their tickets the day the seats came online) when deciding who gets bumped, because it can’t afford to upset their big stakeholders?

I bet anyone who’s travelled with this airline in the last 12 months can name them. The point is that online services and advertising need to be backed up and executed on in the actual business: doing it in the advertising isn’t enough.

I’m not angry, but I am flying Virgin next time!

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…

One of the problems with Google Maps, if you visit Plettenberg Bay in South Africa or Oia in Greece is that they don’t actually have any streets on them. The problem of acquiring all that street data is a tricky one, even in developed countries where they have reliable street maps. Google’s solution, using the people to map their own streets, is similar to the Open Street Map concept. Most people would probably say that if it’s on Google Maps they’ll rely on it, so there’s something very interesting here. Crowd-sourcing, as some refer to the idea of the masses creating a new product, is suddenly taking on authenticity as a source of reference material, and the only other example like this I can think of is wikipedia.

I wonder, thinking back to Tim Berners-Lee’s lecture in March, whether Google will ever try to differentiate between crowd-sourced mapping and authorised, government, mapping. There are places where mapping is very political, so the authority of a map can become very contentious.

As Brady Forrest suggests on the O’Reilly Radar blog, this open source approach to mapping is becoming a very hot topic for a lot of companies.

On a related topic, I was at a meeting with an airline this morning, and we were introducing ourselves. I said that back before the Internet, I’d been a business analyst at Thomas  Cook, designing applications to make it easy for sales people to sell flights. It used to be an incredibly specialised skill, with training courses on the bizarre command line syntax of computerised reservation systems. To find out if there were any seats on a flight from London to Sydney on a given date would’ve been something like “ALHRSYD23JUL” and that was an easy one.

So we tried to design a system to make the work easier for all travel agents. And now we can all do it, using Expedia, or Opodo, or ba.com. And when did you last visit a travel agent?

Oia is incredibly photogenic. I’m posting a few sample photos, so you can see what I mean.

Oia is incredibly photogenic. I’m posting a few sample photos, so you can see what I mean.