Seat reservations are meant to make life easier, no more showing up an hour before departure just to have a fighting chance to get a seat. Of course it works fine elsewhere, but of course Irish Rail can't get it to work. Why because neither staff nor managment make any effort to ensure that it will work.
- Ticket collection machines don't work
- Reserved seats not marked as reserved
- Seats that don't exist
- Dublin - Belfast =/= Belfast - Dublin
You can listen to a podcast of a discussion of the seat reservation system, Irish Rail doing their best to deny problems despite the huge body of evidence that the system just isn't working.
Ticket Collection Problems
While the automated ticket collection system normal works fine, AIB MasterCard holders and Laser card holders in general are likely to experience problems, the collection system will almost certainly refuse to issue the ticket. If it asks for a "PRN" number key in the seat reservation number on the itinerary you got from the website. Failing that you have to queue up at the booking office which in many respects eliminates one of the advantages of seat reservations, avoiding queues.
The ticket you actually receive is far from perfect, as the image on the right shows. The print quality and small typeface used make the ticket difficult to read. It's also not clear where you have to change en route.
Reserved Seats Not Marked As Reserved
On the new Dublin Cork train and indeed on the new Intercity Railcar fleet there is an electronic display above the seats which names the passenger who has reserved the seat. The great advantage of the electronic system is the can be booked by different people for different parts of the journey. Of course it's impossible to remove the display quite unlike the old fashioned paper system.
Severe technical problems have been encountered and despite there being two independent ways to load the information into the train computer it doesn't work with a decent level of reliability. In particular the system tends to fail more often on Cork Dublin services than on Dublin Cork.
On older trains an old fashioned card with your name and the train details printed on it is meant to be placed above your seat. Of course the gadget which prints the cards goes on the blink. It is exceptionally rare to see these cards in place.
Irish Rail make matters even worse by not removing out of date reservation cards, so you will frequently find yourself looking for your seat only to find it appears to be reserved by someone else! Let us not forget every intercity train is meant to be cleaned before the start of each journey.
Sometimes some reserved seats get the reservation cards but others in the same coach are not marked as reserved again leaving the passenger quite confused. And then there are the 'Yellow T-shirts' yes Irish Rail's final line of defence. They spend most of there time standing around, they don't work weekends in Cork and unless you are travelling on the Cork, Tralee or Limerick lines they are unlikely to be able to assist you. Since they only work at terminus stations they are pretty useless if you are boarding elsewhere.
Seats that don't exist
The wonderfully efficient Irish Rail can't even get the the seating layout on their website correct. It has frequently occured in the past that passengers have boarded to find the seat they booked didn't exist in the coach. On other occasions passengers with standard class tickets find that their seat is in a first class coach and first class passengers end up allocated seats in the standard class section, leaving everyone quite confused.
Dublin - Belfast =/= Belfast - Dublin
It is somewhat curious, on Irish Rail's website there is no problem booking a return ticket Dublin - Belfast - Dublin, however try just Belfast Dublin or Belfast - Dublin - Belfast and it will tell you reservations are not possible.
In fact seat reservations in standard class Belfast Dublin are impossible since Translink, the Northern Irish half of the Enterprise operation doesn't support them. Irish Rail well know this but mislead the passenger by giving the illusion that a seat reservation is possible.