April 2018. Hundreds of people were lined up in heavy rain to buy tickets for Spain’s national art museum, the Prado. Some fiddled with their smartphones to alleviate their boredom as they shuffled slowly towards the entrance. They seemed unaware they could use their expensive devices to simplify their lives.
I found a sheltered spot where I brought up the Prado Web site on my phone and bought my ticket online. Feeling mildly embarrassed, I walked to the front of the line and into the museum for an encounter with Hieronymus Bosch.
In previous posts I’ve written about our June 2019 family trip to Andalucia, Southern Spain. My goal was to make our time at bus and train stations as smooth as possible. I loaded four apps onto my phone: Renfe Ticket for trains, Alsa and Malaga for two bus companies, and Passes to manage some tickets. Few people seemed to be using these apps, preferring to stand in line to buy paper tickets at the last minute.
The Passes app, WalletPasses, came in useful for managing some bus tickets when they were supplied as individual files.
With WalletPasses, I was able to bring up a set of tickets, then swipe them one-by-one for the driver to check.
The purchasing of tickets online was not always smooth; for example:
- The Alsa bus company’s app required me to enter passport numbers for all six of us.
- The Malaga app for the Avanza bus company rejected each of my credit cards. Eventually I paid with PayPal.
- One app required an additional piece of information in a field that was covered by a Continue button. After several tries, I realized I had to scroll the background form to reveal the necessary field.
- Time formats were usually 24 hours, but in one case times displayed in 12-hour format. This confused me greatly as I tried to piece together multiple legs of a journey.
- Sometimes an app would break, and I would have to reenter the data.
But at least I could act out my frustrations in the privacy of an Airbnb rather than a bus station. In the end I was always able to buy tickets online.
