Yeah I mean they could have administered travel club manually, separate to MyGers. But retaining a manual scheme as well as another that is dealt with through the ticketing portal would probably have extra admin costs and be really inefficient. Especially when customers would be using the same portal to purchase away Euro tickets.
I also don't know the ins and outs of the system they use, what functionality it has and what customisation options may be available to them without getting developers in. For example we have an industry tailored CRM system at my work and we've been working on a customisation option for a while to capture particular client information and it has cost a small fortune to do it.
I can't really make any claims as to whether what I've been told is valid or not.