• Faraway places
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The free trip to the Amazon rain forest, or the Khyber Pass tour? Faced with this choice at Victoria Coach Station last week I plumped for the Amazon, as you can see from the ticket on this page. Sad to say, it's unlikely that your correspondent will actually get his trip; the tickets were being issued, during inspection of the Coach Station's facelift, to demonstrate the computerized seat booking system which NBC has had on trial there for several months and which is now showing a profit.
The computer terminal at Victoria, which issues tickets ready-printed in a matter of seconds, is plugged into the theatre booking computer system run by Seat Reservation Systems Ltd. The terminal equipment is leased to National Trawl (NBC) by SRS. When you think about it, there is nothing basically different between the process of booking seats for a theatre or for a coach — simply that one stands still and the other moves.