Cubans denounced on social networks theinefficiency of the “Traveling” application, an alternative toOnline sale of tickets of national land transportation, promoted by the government with the intention of avoiding long lines.
“This morning thousands of users could not get tickets through the Viajando apk. I was one of them. They went on sale for three days. All the cars of the Santiago-Havana train disappeared in less than 60 seconds. When you grabbed a seat, you couldn't pay later. “It seemed like a joke,” he commented in hisFacebook profile the Santiago film directorCarlos Amílcar Melián.
Although the director finds it - not without a certain irony - "fantastic" that alternatives to the reality of the queues that invade the daily life of Cubans appear, he feels disappointed that initiatives such as the TuEnvío applications or, in this case, Viajando , end up degenerating.
“Always buying for that apk is quite annoying. The user feels like they are playing soccer with him. The user being the ball. […] One has that feeling that to tie one's shoes another queue is necessary. I gave up trying to pay and spend half a morning, or the entire day on it,” Melián concluded.
Ina text published on the Facebook page ofCuba Time, journalistFreyser Martínez It also recounts the odyssey to get a ticket through “Viajando”, as part of the vicissitudes of a trip from Camagüey to the Cuban capital.
“You open the apk at 8:25 a.m. to be online and purchase the tickets, but the reality is different: all the tickets appear sold in less than a minute! Therefore, it is not viable to be on the lookout 24 hours a day to buy a ghost ticket that you do not even know if it existed,” he denounces.
In addition to dealing with the usual difficulties involved in a trip on the lousy state land transportation service, if you have the unlikely luck of getting a ticket online, you will have to face new setbacks, Martínez says in his text.
“Let's imagine that you get the ticket and manage to get to the train station, as is my case, to check the form of what you purchased online two hours in advance. […] Now they inform you of various news that you did not count on, although you should be prepared given the country where you live. […] Your ticket is, with luck, printed on recovered paper, because 'the Ministry [of Transportation] doesn't have paper,' according to what an official told me,” he says.
Given repeated complaints from users, an official from the Ministry of Transportation,interviewed by Cuban Television News, commented that the difficulties in acquiring tickets are not due to the malfunction of the application, but "to the limitation in the capacity of tickets that are sold."
Although it recognizes that only 50% of the National Bus fleet remains active, the report on official television is not clear about the causes of the deficit in national transportation. He attributes the fact that current bus departures represent only 30% of those that took place before the pandemic to “everyday realities that weigh on their own.”
Both through the “Viajando” application and in person at the agencies, the sale of interprovincial land transportation tickets for trips by bus, railway and the Havana–Batabanó–Nueva Gerona multimodal service was reestablished in Cuba.last October 25, due to the pandemic.
The state-owned Viajero Company warned that tickets had to be purchased a month in advance.
A few days after the sale of tickets through “Viajando” began, the Transportation Information Services Company (Sitrans), which controls the operation of the application, warned about reports ofticket resale from the application and warned that these ran the risk of being invalid.
According to Sitrans, the resale did not violate “the purchasing regulations established by the Viajero company, nor the security of the application,” but there was a risk that false tickets would be provided.
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