How to tell which services are mandatory on an Advance ticket before booking?

[freddie1729]

I am looking at this Advance ticket from Oxford to Cambridge on 17 September. It is telling me to travel via Stansted Airport and get a bus from there. I'd rather travel via Royston and get the replacement bus there instead. Is that allowed on this ticket? Will the journey from London to Cambridge be a "booked train" or a "required connecting service"?

 

[Sleepy]

Via Royston would be using GTR Thameslink so I would say no, I would take the bus journey to be the connecting service in this case.

 

[Alex365Dash]

I am looking at this Advance ticket from Oxford to Cambridge on 17 September. It is telling me to travel via Stansted Airport and get a bus from there. I'd rather travel via Royston and get the replacement bus there instead. Is that allowed on this ticket? Will the journey from London to Cambridge be a "booked train" or a "required connecting service"?

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If you’re already using TrainSplit, add the journey to your basket then click the seat button in the basket for your journey.

The trains that are non-reservable will have no reservation box whilst the counted place reservations will have a box showing that no specific seat has been reserved. Trains that have specific seats to reserve will of course show the seat reservation.

Alternatively, if this takes too long for you, expand the train you’re interested in and hit the Details button. This will take you to a page on the service. If there’s no remarks about reservations (being available, recommended or required, see below screenshot) then you don’t have to travel on that connecting service.



As it is, the only reservable leg of your journey is the GWR service from Oxford. However, the GTR services towards Royston are reservable, so you wouldn’t be able to take these instead.

 

[freddie1729]

How come the GTR services are reservable when there are no Advance tickets available for them? They didn’t used to be reservable.

 

[Alex365Dash]

How come the GTR services are reservable when there are no Advance tickets available for them? They didn’t used to be reservable.

For Thameslink to Cambridge, there are!

I can only imagine for Great Northern services that GTR wishes to control the availability of Advance tickets from further afield places such as Oxford.

 

[Hadders]

How come the GTR services are reservable when there are no Advance tickets available for them? They didn’t used to be reservable.

That is a very good question! No-one really knows.

There are a few journeys on which Advance tickets are offered, but Advance tickets on Thameslink trains would, to be quite frank, be a complete an utter farce, and all but unenforceable from a booked train only point of view.

GTR told me that reservations were available so I ‘could reserve a seat on the train’. I hadn’t got the heart to ask them how this would operate on a packed class 700 train that has so seat reservation displays. They then claimed they didn’t offer reservations on their trains and when I showed them one they claimed it was null and void because it had been issued by a 3rd party retailer!

My suspicion is that it’s so that GTR can set a quota and limit the number of tickets that are sold where their train is the connection on a ‘TOC X & Connections’ Advance ticket. I’ve no proof that this is the case but I can’t think of any other reasons….

 

[Nicholas43]

I have recently bought, and used, an advance ticket from GWR-land to Cambridge which had no specified train to Paddington, and a 'mandatory reservation', with 'No specific seat reserved' from Farringdon to Cambridge. It does seem likely that the deal between GWR and GTR entails a quota for the GTR stretch.

 

[arb]

How come the GTR services are reservable when there are no Advance tickets available for them? They didn’t used to be reservable.

Thameslink introduced seat reservations a couple of years ago (see this thread: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/thameslink-seat-reservations.222628/).

Great Northern did the same more recently: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/great-northern-seat-reservations.252660/

 

[freddie1729]

Great Northern did the same more recently: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/great-northern-seat-reservations.252660/

That explains the issue then. I share the frustration of the person in that thread, having the Great Northern services unreserved was very useful to allow you to get an earlier train than the minimum connection time would allow.

 

[freddie1729]

That was the issue though people were using a plus connections ticket that was cheaper than a peak ticket for just the Great Northern leg on peak services and throwing the "intercity" portion away.

Does this mean I won't be able to do an intercity journey from/to Cambridge if the Great Northern portion is in the peak?

 

[Watershed]

Does this mean I won't be able to do an intercity journey from/to Cambridge if the Great Northern portion is in the peak?

Not necessarily that you can’t, but that any Advance might cost more.