el peregringo

I’ve just spent an hour trying to buy a train ticket with Renfe, the Spanish rail company. I simply cannot understand how a company, in this day and age, can get away with such an awful mess as their online system. Even using a Spanish credit card, it was virtually impossible to actually buy my ticket.

Things were looking good until I got to the point of actually charging the card. Renfe includes a disclaimer saying that the window that was going to open was from the bank and that if the user had trouble, that it wasn’t Renfe’s fault. I did have trouble, and I still blame Renfe for not having a better system.

Part of the problem may be with the Caja Navarra bank. They have the single WORST online banking I have ever seen. They don’t even include a valid doc type or encoding method in their html, and then once connected, they use frames in places they’re unnecessary and have spurious scroll bars in unlikely places. The National Bank of Middlebury has an online banking and bill paying experience that is orders of magnitude superior to the Caja Navarra.