Contact Ventra Support

When I heard Ventra would be updating and you'd finally bw able to have your Ventra card in your Wallet app, I was excited. That excitement dissipated the minute I set it up. For starters, once you put it in the Wallet app, your physical Ventra card will not work anymore, which is idiotic considering how buggy and half tested the digital card is. There were times where it would take way too long to read my card, and now it just flat out will not work. I've had several people tap me onto the train today because I was standing at the turnstile just aimlessly trying to get the reader to sense that my phone was right on top of it. I remember when Ventra was first announced how excited I was to have a contactless card instead of the old magstripe bus cards of the past, and when it worked seamlessly, I knew Ventra was gonna be the way of the future for traveling on the CTA. This new way to use Ventra needs to be worked on some more before I recommend anyone try it.

-stars This had to be developed by a team that never used public transportation. It’s not convenient and trying to navigate quickly is impossible. I liked the past app had the drop down menus, and I could see all the stops the train was going to make so I could also decide which was express. That also allowed me to see which stop I might use if I was walking in the city. I also don’t like that it automatically gives me the metro I’m closest to at that point. That makes me have to navigate around to the stop or line I actually want to use. There’s a lot of unnecessary information presented to me that I have to process and that’s not what I need to be doing when I’m trying to not miss transportation. I don’t want to have to add favorites because I don’t always know where I’ll be. So trying to find a metro line on the fly is not intuitive. I can’t help but think this development was created by some company owed a favor or vs versa in typical Chicago corruption style.

It’s unacceptable that you can’t use the app if there’s an update. So if I’m in a rush and can’t use it until I update, I just miss my train because I can’t get in until update is done? I have never seen that with any other app ever in the 12ish years that I’ve been using an iPhone. *update* I received this reply from the developer: “Sorry for this unavoidable inconvenience—we definitely don’t like to force an update to occur, but it has been necessary both in retiring the old app (which is no longer supported by its makers after several weeks of transition), and sometimes in updating to a new version for security and/or stability reasons. Though we, like others, do plan to keep this very rare, it’s occasionally necessary require an update sometimes in apps like this or a banking app, where you can manage money stored in an account, to ensure stability and/or account security." I did not have the old app, I had already upgraded to the new app and this still happened. I also don’t believe I have ever been forced to update to use an app. An email or notification should have proceeded this forced update so we users/customers could have updated when convenient instead of being surprised and caught off guard. This reply does not convince me to change my review.