dcsprior
Member
If you pay just before departure you may be unable to get a seat reservation, if it's busy.
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LNER to pilot removal of Off-Peak tickets
- Thread starter Fuzzytop
- Start date
If you pay just before departure you may be unable to get a seat reservation, if it's busy.
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Is it? The idea of the trial is that the Advance is the normal fare, and while you can buy an Anytime it's really just intended as a (high) price cap. I would therefore expect Advances to be sold for every seat on less busy trains.
You won't be able to get a seat reservation regardless in those circumstances as there are none left. Hence having to select a train you don't intend to travel on.
If they won't sell you a ticket online then all the reservable seats are probably already gone.
If a train that only has two seats "left" is a less busy train, what does a busy train look like, though?
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
One that sold out weeks ago. Modern yield management isn't as simple as "first ticket £1, last ticket £299" as Ryanair traditionally worked, it's about working out what you can charge for a given train based on calculated demand for it, and as such fares tend to vary a lot less over time than they used to. See also pricing of stuff like Premier Inns where I've picked up a "last few rooms" room for under 50 quid, or a Travelodge on the day for £25.
Indeed, that's quite likely at certain times too - but people often want to travel without planning in advance (like, say, 11% of people). Examples like waking up on a nice day and deciding on the spur of the moment to go to the seaside, or whatever.
Then there are meetings called at short notice, people needing to travel at short notice because of (reasons) and so on.
I think people accept the risk, or they might upgrade to first class (and on Avanti, many will upgrade to Standard Premier) to get a seat.
Otherwise in all of those cases, you'll take the car instead - which is hardly good for road congestion or (until everyone has an EV) the environment in general - but this Government seems unable to look at the bigger picture. If it had, it would have invested fully in HS2 and we wouldn't have problems with overcrowding.
There are of course some people who don't have cars.
"Busy" seems the wrong word to me if both trains are "sold out".
Anyway I'd have thought they'd want to keep some seats back for those willing or forced to pay silly prices to travel at short notice. Good news I suppose if that's not how it's going to work, though still being able to pay an off peak fare and stand if necessary would be even better.
And of course people who may have planned a trip well in advance but don't know what time they'll need to travel on one or both legs.
Leaving it to see what tickets are left on the day to travel back is somewhat chancy, and also loses you the rights you have in disruption from already having bought a ticket.
It's weird how common it is now to see some nights in cities where many hotels are completely sold out, but there's still availability towards the bottom end of the price range at just one property. Usually it's because there's something just slightly worse about the 'dud', such as it's summer and it's the only one that's non air conditioned, or they're all pretty well located hotels but this one is just a bit of an inconvenient walk out of the centre.
Think again.
Some seats are unreserved but it's a small number. You have absolutely no guarantee of getting one even if you pay £200.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
On compulsory reservation operations where fares are reasonable (e.g. SNCF, Trenitalia) what you do is book the most likely one and change it on the day if there's space. But the problem here is that the whole point of this isn't to change to a more TGV style operation, rather the point is to increase fares to levels that aren't reasonable.
And of course, TGVs don't sell out anything like as readily because they are usually able to actually respond to the demand. A purpose-built dedicated set of routes generally helps with that.
It does fall apart slightly during disruption, on peak days at the start of holidays when there's not enough capacity to physically get everyone out of Paris no matter what, and on long routes on classic lines when there's an event on (easy to run Lyon - Paris reliefs, not so easy to get more TGVs into Cannes on the festival for example) . But they're far more responsive than LNER can afford to be.
LNW-GW Joint
Veteran Member
Sitting here at 1730 Sunday, looking at Edinburgh-London tomorrow (Monday morning):
LNER will charge 193.90 on any train (a 4+ hour journey), it's 101.70 Advance on the 0548 and 0626, 92.20 on the 0730 or later (+20 on all these for a 70-min ticket).
EasyJet want 61.49 on the 0700 to Luton, and 94.49 on the 0615 to Gatwick.
BA want 189 on the 0610 to LHR, 124 on the 0730 and just 62 on the 0830.
But to LCY they want 406 on the 0640 and 0730 and 142 on the 0700.
All the air journeys are about a hour, arguably much faster than the train end to end.
Some people will pay an extraordinary amount to be in London early on Monday.
Actually I was expecting all the air fares to be extremely high for the weekly peak into London, which is clearly not the case.
Believe me I realise the idea seems to be to put up fares (of course what is reasonable is subjective).
But a consequence is going to be not just people paying more, but making it difficult to make a rail journey if you can't be sure when you'll need to travel (or indeed if you might have to cancel the trip).
They could of course remove the £10 fee to change tickets which seems to me rather a lot for an automated process (particularly when charged per ticket as is usually the case) and if - as you've suggested - there is likely to be a limited range of fares for a given train rather than a steady increase over time, it would presumably not cost a lot extra to change on the day.
I wonder if it would lead to financial ruin if they let you cancel an advance ticket in return for credit, as I believe DB does.
Maybe Tuesdays are the new Mondays? Isn't being in the office Tuesday to Thursday a bit of a thing now?
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Allowing Advance cancellations for a voucher was trialled extensively from 2020 to 2022 due to COVID and apparently it did cost the industry more than a few quid, I suspect partly due to people trading down from flexible tickets.
johncrossley
Established Member
*Some* people, yes. *Most* people can't afford it.
Is there a need to pay the £10 fee anyway? Is there any good reason to book Advance fares with LNER when you can book the same fares with Cross Country without admin fee?
Demand for that sort of journey has recovered poorly compared to others of course...
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Seat selection.
OK, you could reserve another via the LNER site, but that wastes a seat so if too many people do it LNER will start enforcing the "must sit in booked seat" term of Advances.
I think they still charge the £10 if you change on the day, which is what I was talking about above.
So once you've effectively removed flexible tickets maybe it would be less of a problem.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I certainly do think that if Advances are to be the main form of fare then their T&Cs need to be made friendlier and less petty even if it might cost the railway a quid or two if the odd person finds an anomaly. I created a speculative thread here to delve into that:
Advances - do we need some changes to T&Cs?
In light of the LNER trial, it's worth noting that things have very much changed with regard to Advances. They started off as APEX under BR as a deep discount ticket requiring 7 days advance booking (and the SuperAPEX at 14 days) and developed further as "Virgin Value" into their current form...
www.railforums.co.uk
johncrossley
Established Member
I've changed Advance tickets less than an hour before departure without paying a fee.
Haywain
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 3 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 15,537
I don't think it was ever suggested that it was a trial. It was more a concession linked to CoVid restrictions, presumably to discourage people from travelling if they had tested positive.
johncrossley
Established Member
That doesn't make sense. The normal rules for Advance tickets allow you to change anytime before departure. They don't mention a separate rule for changes on the day of departure. They can't simply ban changes on the day of departure.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It wasn't intended as a trial but in effect was one as a side effect. If it'd been financially beneficial it would have been retained.
No, but this was on the "We’ve made it free to change your Advance train tickets" page.
Of course with BA you also have to consider a return journey to get a fully representative figure, since they don't offer single leg pricing.
If returning any day until the Saturday of that week, the outward fares drop to £151 on the 06:10 and £101 on the 07:30 to Heathrow. Meanwhile the LCY fares reduce to £371 on the 06:40 and 07:30 and £131 on the 07:00.
Prices are even lower (considerably so in the case of LCY - fares drop to £121 and £82, respectively) if you have a Saturday night stay in your booking.
The smart money, of course, is in buying a Plus fare for the cheapest flight of the day and then changing it for free at midnight on the day of departure to any flight that still has seats available. That would allow you to take any of the LHR flights for £114, for example. That's the sort of flexibility I'd expect from LNER with their "Flex" fare.
Wallsendmag
Established Member
It was never a trial it was in case of another lock down
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It wasn't intended as a trial but it provided the data as one would.
lewismachyach
Member
Wouldn't the data have been skewed since COVID was an unusual scenario, though?
Joe Paxton
Established Member
- Joined
- 12 Jan 2017
- Messages
- 2,468
Referring back to my earlier post #1,103 in this thread...
Looking at the 1100 tomorrow (Mon 12 Feb) for a Kings Cross to Newcastle journey, this is what I was presented with a little earlier this evening - my screen snip is timestamped at 20:09...
So apparently 6 seats in Standard are available (and seemingly became available since my first post in the early hours of Sunday morning, when only 2 seats or at least tickets were shown as available even for the Fully Flex aka Anytime fare).
But checking again just now, at 21:40, and even the Standard class Fully Flex fare is shown as "not available"...
Have all those supposed 6 seats been reserved in the last hour and a half? And by people paying for the full whack Fully Flex fare? (Or could some of them have been flexing their Semi-Flex tickets and changing reservations to travel on an earlier or later train?)
It all just seems a bit murky and mysterious - particularly the conflation of remaining seats available, and remaining tickets available. But also where did those 6 seats / tickets, available just a little earlier this evening, go?
Looking at the 1100 tomorrow (Mon 12 Feb) for a Kings Cross to Newcastle journey, this is what I was presented with a little earlier this evening - my screen snip is timestamped at 20:09...
So apparently 6 seats in Standard are available (and seemingly became available since my first post in the early hours of Sunday morning, when only 2 seats or at least tickets were shown as available even for the Fully Flex aka Anytime fare).
But checking again just now, at 21:40, and even the Standard class Fully Flex fare is shown as "not available"...
Have all those supposed 6 seats been reserved in the last hour and a half? And by people paying for the full whack Fully Flex fare? (Or could some of them have been flexing their Semi-Flex tickets and changing reservations to travel on an earlier or later train?)
It all just seems a bit murky and mysterious - particularly the conflation of remaining seats available, and remaining tickets available. But also where did those 6 seats / tickets, available just a little earlier this evening, go?
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