LNER to pilot removal of Off-Peak tickets

[Starmill]

It absolutely does. I've come across two very useful Anytime Day Single splits because of it (OK, one only saves £1.50 but the other over a fiver). But only if it's the cheapest option, it doesn't give you an option for a flexible-only split if an Advance (split or otherwise) is cheaper.

What I don't understand is why it doesn't seem to split those "off peak" LNER Anytimes. Does it perhaps only split the same ticket type or something, i.e. it won't give you two Off Peaks to substitute for an overpriced Anytime? I can't imagine them being stupid enough to collude with LNER by removing only that route from their split functionality, as to do so would likely be illegal as anticompetitive behaviour.

OK - apologies for the poor phrasing. The splits it offers for flexible tickets are absolutely rubbish compared to the ones Trainsplit can find. It frequently misses splits even where you change trains for example. They're obviously using some of their own logic, not colluding with LNER, and their logic is simply badly made.

 

[Bletchleyite]

OK - apologies for the poor phrasing. The splits it offers for flexible tickets are absolutely rubbish compared to the ones Trainsplit can find. It frequently misses splits even where you change trains for example. They're obviously using some of their own logic, not colluding with LNER, and their logic is simply badly made.

Agreed, it's not very good. It did however find me a couple of savings which I'm more than happy with (and I've still never paid it any fees!)

It does surprise me it doesn't find the LNER ones, but it indeed could just be a poor algorithm that e.g. only splits within a ticket type (so as there's no Super Off Peak through fare it won't find splits for that ticket type, for example). The only ones I use regularly are split Anytime Day Singles (amazes me that there are anomalies in those given that they're unrestricted and all the fares involved are ones where that fare is regulated!).

I see by the way this month's Modern Railways (just arrived) has several articles advocating LNER's trial and indeed the total abolition of fares regulation. Roger Ford (who does seem to advocate it strongly, he's always been pro anything the ECML operator did to the point of coming across as a shill at times) is no doubt involved. I normally respect him, but he's clearly very well off and clearly advocates for a system whereby he doesn't mind as long as his train isn't busy.

 

[yorksrob]

Modern Railways is a good read, however it can be a bit "railway establishment" at times. This may be one of those times.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Modern Railways is a good read, however it can be a bit "railway establishment" at times. This may be one of those times.

The article on p74 of March's edition by Paul Cooper is even worse still.

First of all we have this tripe:

Let's say I had a meeting in London and decided I would most likely get the 1400 back. Previously I could have booked the usual Advance fare at £59.50 and either hung around if my meeting finished early or curtailed the meeting if it was overrunning to catch my booked train, or faced paying for a new ticket at an additional cost of £87

First of all, if you travelled earlier you would do nothing of the sort - you'd pay £10 + fare difference to change it to an Off Peak, which is £37.50. This is more than £20, but the point is you'd only do that once in a while - if it was every time you'd choose an earlier train when you book, so you'd be paying £37.50 sometimes vs. £20 always, which would soon move in favour of the Off Peak. And if you knew your meeting was overrunning, surely you'd just ask for a short pause and pull your phone out and change it rather than being stung for a new ticket (which I have done several times with flights)? This is grossly disingenuous and a so-called professional journalist with 40 years' experience in the industry really should know better.

Secondarily, and more interestingly, it seems to confirm my suspicion that this was LNER-led:

So, well done to the team at LNER and the Great British Railways Transition Team who have managed to persuade the DfT and Treasury to give the go-ahead

So at least now we know who to aim our ire at, and that's firmly a certain Mr Horne, as I long suspected I had read before but didn't have the old copy to prove it.

The article also fails to mention significant disadvantages of an all-Advances system like flexibility in disruption. This is solvable - make an Advance an Any Permitted Anytime Day Single if a connection is missed or will be missed, a booked train is cancelled or there's a delay in excess of a specified amount (30 mins maybe?) - but the industry isn't willing to look at such things because it is fundamentally culturally anti-passenger from top to bottom, something that is because it gets its money however badly it does.

 

[AdamWW]

The article on p74 of March's edition by Paul Cooper is even worse still.

Hmmm.

Of course they could have introduced semi-flexes and still kept off peak tickets.....

 

[Bletchleyite]

Hmmm.

Of course they could have introduced semi-flexes and still kept off peak tickets.....

They could, but the article's tone makes it clear that it's about increasing revenue.

I do get that they might want to price Friday PM/Sunday PM up a bit to be able to price other trains down and fill them, to be fair, but options like dropping the Anytime significantly (or increasing the Super Off Peak while reducing its restrictions to offset) would have allowed that while avoiding ripping people off.

 

[RJ]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

 

[AdamWW]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

Was the "uproar" really that this would on balance turn people away from the railway? I didn't think so.

If you consider the purpose of the railway is to maximise revenue without any other consideration then I'm sure this will be a great success.

If (like me) you'd like to see the railway continue to cater for those who can't fix their plans an arbitrary amount of time before travel, to maintain a limit on how high ticket prices can go, and not to make life even harder than it currently is in disruption, then it is a problem.

Being selfish, it doesn't help me if I can't use the train any more in the way I need but other people are filling the trains up.

Looking at it more widely, a move towards flexible travel being available only to those with a car may not be the best thing for the country overall.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

I bet an Anytime Single from London to Edinburgh* that Lumo are doing very well indeed out of this. I wonder if they'll try to run more 10 car services at busy times to capitalise on it?

Potentially Avanti also are. Yesterday and this morning all the Euston-Glasgow services were sold out, and even some of the "via Brum" ones.

* Joke

 

[NorthOxonian]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

But it does seem like these changes are incremental - it's not that the fares have necessarily shot up yet, but now LNER have the potential to make this so. The metaphor of the boiling frog comes to mind: people grumbling but putting up with a series of rises, while paying less attention to the brutal cumulative impact...

 

[Bletchleyite]

Being selfish, it doesn't help me if I can't use the train any more in the way I need but other people are filling the trains up.

Well, no.

The certain outcome of this going national would be me making far more car journeys, and perhaps investing in a decent EV to reduce the cost of them further.

Looking at it more widely, a move towards flexible travel being available only to those with a car may not be the best thing for the country overall.

Quite. And there are ways Advances could be changed to be a little less inflexible, but they don't seem to want to entertain that, e.g. make them refundable to an e-voucher, remove the £10 admin fee and make the Anytime not at a "penalty" rate. (I'd like to see all those things trialled).

But it does seem like these changes are incremental - it's not that the fares have necessarily shot up yet, but now LNER have the potential to make this so. The metaphor of the boiling frog comes to mind: people grumbling but putting up with a series of rises, while paying less attention to the brutal cumulative impact...

It's obvious that one intended outcome of this (and the article I mentioned also alludes to that) is that fares can be crept up without people noticing. Very much a Fordian "boiling frog".

Nobody goes on about the annual easyJet fares rise, because there isn't one.

 

[DanNCL]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

Yet. It’s still early days. Give it time.

 

[AdamWW]

Quite. And there are ways Advances could be changed to be a little less inflexible, but they don't seem to want to entertain that, e.g. make them refundable to an e-voucher, remove the £10 admin fee and make the Anytime not at a "penalty" rate. (I'd like to see all those things trialled).

I could imagine this being a convenient combination of:
1) Doing this would involve changes across the industry to ticketing systems whereas introducing the new tickets didn't
2) It's better to start off with something harsher then you actually want because those against the changes can waste their time pushing for things you're prepared to do anyway and it deflects effort from trying to get them reversed completely.

 

[YorkRailFan]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

Yes, but not everyone is traveling Edinburgh/Berwick/Newcastle-London or vice versa.

 

[takno]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

Yup, half term and a weekend when the busiest part of the service is completely closed is definitely the optimal time to judge whether people are still packing the trains out. Not to mention that people may well have already made the decision to go by train this time before they find out that the prices have radically changed.

 

[modernrail]

Does Modern Railways have a letters section?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Does Modern Railways have a letters section?

Yes, and I suspect it's going to get one or two after the blatent shilling for LNER that constitutes about 10% of the latest (otherwise rather thin-feeling) issue.

Ford is the worst at it - as I said he's clearly rich and doesn't care what it costs as long as he gets a nice quiet train. You can see that on Twitter very clearly. I could be swayed in favour of compulsory reservation - it does have some benefits - but not this unreasonable approach to fares. (Remember, CR and airline style pricing are two separate things, plenty of railways worldwide have CR but fixed fares).

 

[modernrail]

You say "leakage" as if there wouldn't be any cost to developing, maintaining and operating in-house retailing facilities. Clearly, there would be such costs; whilst they might not amount to 5%, they would certainly not be insubstantial.

Paying commission for third parties to sell tickets is normal practice across the transport sector and therefore I think it's misleading to suggest that this kind of 'cost of sales' is in any way avoidable.


It is far easier to provide a cookie-cutter online website containing information than to develop a site retailing train tickets. The complexity of the latter can't be underestimated.

.gov.uk sites are also a very rare example of the government getting IT right. It is the exception to the rule in almost all senses.


Yes, but without sites that sell split tickets, I'm sure that LNER wouldn't have introduced their own internal split ticketing functionality (which discounts certain LNER tickets to match external split prices - a rather anticompetitive action).

Like it or not, splits are a function of our fare system; there is absolutely no prospect of fares being cut to avoid splits being cheaper.

TOCS already have booking engines though and we have somehow managed to pay for lots of them rather than 1. That is a huge amount of duplication.

So we have duplication of similar functionality of booking engines in public ownership and a slightly better private sector effort that is attracting loads of custom because of its bit better UX but also because it feels like the one stop shop that the various and similar TOC engines don’t feel like. A unified public option would surely have been able to spend less overall in development than all the individual ones to get to a better place because it had more to spend per function.

If I use only LNER, which is a reasonable and functional booking engine (albeit not offering split ticketing) then my 5% is going directly back into the system isn’t it? Whereas if I use the Trainline it is leaking.

Okay maybe 1% of my 5% (if that surely) might be going on continuous improvement of the engine, hosting etc, but could it ever really cost 5%? 5% of an anytime fare is about £10. Even £5 per ticket feels like massive overkill as a genuine cost of sale. If it is £5 per ticket then close the bloody websites down and open some more ticket offices!

 

[Starmill]

Despite all the apparent uproar, the trains are still packed out. People vote with their feet and it looks like the consensus is that the changes aren’t stopping people from travelling.

The reality is the trial is being judged on its ability to raise revenue, which it's almost certain to achieve. Capacity on these trains is very small in relation to the market, so there's lots of scope to just keep increasing prices - when an existing user baulks at a price rise there'll still be another wealthier or more desperate one to take their place. If you view railways as a state subsidised money-making machine, and not a corporation with social value objectives, in a free market the prices would be even higher than £194 on London - Edinburgh. But of course in that free market places like Lincoln and Harrogate would recieve zero rail services at all, so buyer beware...

Tl;dr uproar is perfectly justified regardless of how good the commercial performance of the trial is, because that is in itself a central criticism of the trial

Agreed, it's not very good. It did however find me a couple of savings which I'm more than happy with (and I've still never paid it any fees!)

If you found an all flexible ticket split on the trainline app which wasn't on the Trainsplit app I strongly recommend emailing the screenshots through the Trainsplit customer service. My experience with their customer service is that it's highly responsive, and has always genuinely understood the question I was asking. Of course, if you just like the UI on trainline and don't like the UI on Trainsplit so didn't use it, that's very much understandable too, and app UI is something which I understand they're very aware of improving for the future.

 

[Bletchleyite]

If you found an all flexible ticket split on the trainline app which wasn't on the Trainsplit app I strongly recommend emailing the screenshots through the Trainsplit customer service. My experience with their customer service is that it's highly responsive, and has always genuinely understood the question I was asking. Of course, if you just like the UI on trainline and don't like the UI on Trainsplit so didn't use it, that's very much understandable too, and app UI is something which I understand they're very aware of improving for the future.

I started using Trainline for walk-up on the day tickets because of the UI, specifically that it's only one tap from the confirmation screen to the tickets being in my Apple Wallet. The LNR app I used previously required waiting for the confirmation email and faffing about with that.

The splits are a bonus.

I use Trainsplit on the PC for booking complex stuff (more because of the seat selector than the actual splits).

Tl;dr uproar is perfectly justified regardless of how good the commercial performance of the trial is, because that is in itself a central criticism of the trial

Totally agreed. The basis of this is making money.

 

[AdamWW]

(Remember, CR and airline style pricing are two separate things, plenty of railways worldwide have CR but fixed fares).

They are but I think LNER is very deliberately avoiding addressing the issue that it's not just ticket price that matters for many people, it's at what point you have to buy a non refundable, inflexible ticket to get that price.

 

[modernrail]

The reality is the trial is being judged on its ability to raise revenue, which it's almost certain to achieve. Capacity on these trains is very small in relation to the market, so there's lots of scope to just keep increasing prices - when an existing user baulks at a price rise there'll still be another wealthier or more desperate one to take their place. If you view railways as a state subsidised money-making machine, and not a corporation with social value objectives, in a free market the prices would be even higher than £194 on London - Edinburgh. But of course in that free market places like Lincoln and Harrogate would recieve zero rail services at all, so buyer beware...

Tl;dr uproar is perfectly justified regardless of how good the commercial performance of the trial is, because that is in itself a central criticism of the trial


If you found an all flexible ticket split on the trainline app which wasn't on the Trainsplit app I strongly recommend emailing the screenshots through the Trainsplit customer service. My experience with their customer service is that it's highly responsive, and has always genuinely understood the question I was asking. Of course, if you just like the UI on trainline and don't like the UI on Trainsplit so didn't use it, that's very much understandable too, and app UI is something which I understand they're very aware of improving for the future.

Exactly. If the railway is going to price off most of the population from more trains, you can remove the subsidy as well. Stuff subsidising people who can afford to pay £195.

Also stuff subsiding people who book cheap advances months in advance for largely leisure travel.

The principle purpose of subsidy is surely to create a usable, viable , affordable method of transport, ideally integrated transport. The job of the companies running the trains should be to ensure all possible potential empty seats are filled to minimise the need for subsidy. So yes advances have their place but largely on marginal services that need bums on seats to minimise subsidy.

If every innovation on the railway was judged on whether it passes the ‘integrated mode of transport’ test, almost everything that has happened on UK railways in recent years would fail the test. This ‘innovation’ more than most.

So fine. If you want to go this way, I and I am sure plenty of people have absolutely no wish to subsidise at all. I would rather the money goes on a service and not on a national transport lottery show.

 

[Starmill]

Ford is the worst at it - as I said he's clearly rich and doesn't care what it costs as long as he gets a nice quiet train. You can see that on Twitter very clearly. I could be swayed in favour of compulsory reservation - it does have some benefits - but not this unreasonable approach to fares. (Remember, CR and airline style pricing are two separate things, plenty of railways worldwide have CR but fixed fares).

I noted he went so far as to comment publicly on LinkedIn, and under his real name, in reply to another comment about "mismatched capacity" causing another person to be "squatting in a vestibule where the ceiling is lower than my head" the following (verbatim):

It's not you having to squat in the vestibule that's the problem, it's you sitting on the floor stopping the refreshment trolley getting to my seat!!

Exactly. If the railway is going to price off most of the population from more trains, you can remove the subsidy as well. Stuff subsidising people who can afford to pay £195.

Exactly. The only reason they can charge that is because we, the general public, including all those who never use rail themselves, are bankrolling their enormous cost base that's allowing them to lease those trains, pay their staff under permanent employment, and that supports the vast, vast cost of keeping their infrastructure going.

The principle purpose of subsidy is surely to create a usable, viable , affordable method of transport, ideally integrated transport. The job of the companies running the trains should be to ensure all possible potential empty seats are filled to minimise the need for subsidy. So yes advances have their place but largely on marginal services that need bums on seats to minimise subsidy.

Indeed. But of course as with nearly everywhere in the industry, Advance tickets aren't managed to maximise rider numbers, they're there to maximise revenue.

 

[Haywain]

TOCS already have booking engines though and we have somehow managed to pay for lots of them rather than 1. That is a huge amount of duplication.

There are only a small number of booking engines used by TOCs, with Trainline being a major supplier, alongside Worldline. Other than LNER I can only think of two other suppliers than those, the ones used by Avanti and c2c and by GTR and Southeastern. So that's essentially 5 booking engines across all TOCs.

 

[modernrail]

This has all arisen partly because we have done that absolutely UK classic thing of failing to stop, think and define the purpose of something and its value.

That is in stark contrast to some of our continental neighbours.

If you don’t set in very clear terms the public policy justification for massive amounts of subsidy (running a reasonably priced transport service that is increasingly part of an integrated system), you don’t (1) monitor and adjust input of that subsidy in the right way (leaving you with a much bigger bill than before privatisation) whilst (2) the service itself degenerates with stupid, bloody ill thought out incremental ‘clever’ changes and loads and loads of profiteering around the margins that start to add up to serious cost drag.

LNER are getting all excited about innovating (and lying about the purpose) of another incremental change whilst massively undermining the argument for their existence in the first place.

 

[Haywain]

running a reasonably priced transport service that is increasingly part of an integrated system

None of that is government policy.

 

[modernrail]

There are only a small number of booking engines used by TOCs, with Trainline being a major supplier, alongside Worldline. Other than LNER I can only think of two other suppliers than those, the ones used by Avanti and c2c and by GTR and Southeastern. So that's essentially 5 booking engines across all TOCs.

Do we need 5? Which other countries have that many?

I could see an argument if they were competing to give you the lowest ‘booking’ cost by competing over the 5% resulting in an actual difference in cost of tickets (although 5% is not really enough to kick off proper competitive behaviour), but I really can’t see the point of that level of duplication where the only meaningful innovation is offering split ticketing (which feels more like a naughty try on that might get shut down any minute rather than a proper thing).

None of that is government policy.

Remove the subsidy then. Why on earth should a tax payer subside unionised salaries, over the top exec salaries, significant private sector profits, carriage for the wealthy only and quite frankly an increasing cost of infrastructure headache with 200 year old kit getting increasingly old and increasingly smashed by bad weather.

The whole industry should remember where its bread is actually buttered. No subsidy, no railway. Remove the reason for people to fight for it by loading your trains with people who will happily get a flight instead or who are discretionary users off to see the Lion King and you lose the connectivity between the purpose of the thing and its ability to achieve air time in the political discussion.

 

[Haywain]

Remove the subsidy then.

That would solve your problem then, because there wouldn't be any passenger trains.

 

[modernrail]

That would solve your problem then, because there wouldn't be any passenger trains.

Well obviously there wouldn’t. Just like if there was no funding for the NHS there would be no healthcare. Just like if there was no funding for local authorities there would be no bin collection. That’s kind of how public services work. That’s very obviously the point that is being made.

 

[Bletchleyite]

That would solve your problem then, because there wouldn't be any passenger trains.

Lumo beg to differ.