The current government is happy to make expensive overtures to motorists - never increasing fuel duty, rolling back on low emissions zones etc.
Who's to say another government might not court the rail passengers vote.
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LNER to pilot removal of Off-Peak tickets
- Thread starter Fuzzytop
- Start date
The current government is happy to make expensive overtures to motorists - never increasing fuel duty, rolling back on low emissions zones etc.
Who's to say another government might not court the rail passengers vote.
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R
RailUK Forums
One of the much bigger problems nowadays is definitely people not taking up their booked seats. Previously this mattered very little, but now it often means random small handfuls of seats that are just left vacant end-to-end in an otherwise near-capacity coach. In time gone by people wouldn't be standing while letting a seat go unused for a long journey. But of course now the people who were standing are probably not even on the train.
Similar with the single leg pricing, which enabled people to more easily mix and match with flights, removing any loyalty discount for a return journey by rail, this is really bad for volume. LNER's response is to push for higher yield.
Even Eurostar weren't this daft about compulsory reservation. Before Brexit they went overbooked on nearly every train some summer Fridays - not doing so would be ridiculous and wasteful.
You are probably more politically astute than me. I would have thought a promise of a consultation would be a possibility. Maybe not.
If the government just came out and said that the country can't afford a walk-up railway any more I would not be happy but it would be a lot better than the pretence that this is all about making passenger's lives better.
I suppose simple statistics tells you which is worth more in terms of votes.
BRX
Established Member
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Is this what actually happens - doesn't it work both ways? Some people who'd have otherwise gone both directions by train might swap to a flight on one leg... But also, some people who'd otherwise have gone both directions by plane might now swap to the train on one leg.
A loyalty discount for a return is also a penalty charge for a single.
In 2011 duty was 6p/litre +VAT more than it is today. Retail and wholesale prices not so different now to then. Tells a story.
Not really because Lumo, Ryanair and EasyJet compete strongly on price. LNER do not.
On the other hand they may gain people for half a trip who would otherwise have flown both ways.
In the days before advance purchase tickets went to singles there were times I did a triangular journey and flew from Edinburgh to London because the compulsory return pricing meant the plane was considerably cheaper, even though I would have preferred the train.
One I managed to get a return cheap enough to just throw away the other half.
It is very, very difficult to do that from the perspective of the "quality traditional" though. LNER know that they are rarely the lowest in price. Their costs are so bloated compared to challengers that they can never really compete on price alone. Therefore they try to appeal mainly on their stated quality and convenience, like lower carbon emissions and stopping more centrally located, not on being cheaper. The sort of customer who looks at it the way you suggest is going to look at headline price more than anything else.
thedbdiboy
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Those first three are fully private sector operators. The last one is a publicly owned company. Interesting given the popular view that nationalising things turns them into cuddly benevolent organisations that exist only for the benefit of the people.
I booked a Wakefield - London trip recently for 26 February to get there for around 10 - 10:30AM
All the below are supposedly 'advance' fares
07:13 (08:59 arrival) £126.60
07:28 (09:30) £117.10
07:54 (09:54) £117.10
08:29 (10:30) £81.10
Meanwhile 07:47 (10:07 arrival) on Grand Central £44.00
The message from LNER seems to be 'we really don't want anything but business customers on our early morning services'!
They do compete slightly better later in the day but if this trial extends then who knows
All the below are supposedly 'advance' fares
07:13 (08:59 arrival) £126.60
07:28 (09:30) £117.10
07:54 (09:54) £117.10
08:29 (10:30) £81.10
Meanwhile 07:47 (10:07 arrival) on Grand Central £44.00
The message from LNER seems to be 'we really don't want anything but business customers on our early morning services'!
They do compete slightly better later in the day but if this trial extends then who knows
BRX
Established Member
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I don't really see what this has got to do with the point being discussed - which was whether single leg pricing is likely to result in a net loss of passengers.
As I say quite regularly, a rail ticket has a true value. That value goes beyond the journey from A to B (and back again where applicable). Your rights as a passenger are part of that value, and this really matters when things go wrong. If your LNER service is cancelled there’s another half an hour later that you can board without question. If your Grand Central is cancelled there’s no real world guarantee you’ll actually get to your destination without more financial outlay which you’ll have to fight to get back. The next train might be 4 hours later, or there may not be one until the next day. Is this worth the massive price difference? Likely not but you must take it into account.
I’d be surprised if there isn’t one already.
But are they unaffected?
If an advance ticket where the SSS would have been valid is now £125 then this might make people go for the earlier train (where an SSS wouldn’t have been valid) as advances are ‘only’ £145. This uses up limited quota on the earlier train meaning you end up with only the SOS left. So the fact there are no advances left on an early train MAY well have been affected by the price increase later in the day.
I guess if you had the option of £87 or £192 then you’d leave it an hour and pay £87, if the options are £130 and £150 you might consider for example the extra time in London to be worth £20 extra, but wouldn’t consider it worth over £100 extra.
I don't think that's a meaningful comparison. (Though perhaps some truth in it in terms of leasing costs for DfT procured 800s).
All four companies will be doing the same thing - maximising revenue less costs. That doesn't necessarily mean being the cheapest. If you provide a service that people will pay more for, that's what you do.
If Easyjet and Ryanair could make more profit charging Anytime style fares and running half empty planes for early arrivals into London you can be pretty sure they'd do it.
Anyway we can very easily test your hypothesis by looking at other Intercity operators and indeed the East Coast franchise as it's gone in and out of DfT control.
I don't think there are dramatic differences in pricing policies.
Yep that's a fair point! I suppose I should have phrased it more along the lines of "unclear how those prices may have been affected" as they certainly could have been.
Indeed.
Well, rail users are very much the lion that hasn't roared yet.
Perhaps if a narrative were to build up around the overall price of fares, which all rail users could identify with, we might pose more of a threat at elections.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
No, you keep going on about "Off Peaks overcrowding trains" - that is not what this is about whatsoever. Nobody is trying to solve overcrowding.
It's an analogy to illustrate how the idiom isn't meant to be taken literally.
Rail accounts for a tiny percentage of journeys and cannot ever be a vote-winner. The railway has declined in the public imagination during my lifetime - journeys are up, but the political position it occupies is much less obvious - and is at best a fringe issue. One of the most serious problems facing rail is that many of its advocates are unserious or po-faced.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
How “cuddly” an organisation is depends on its management and its ownership.
FWIW I don’t think all of this does come from the government. David Horne was the grand master of price gouging when LNER was VTEC. If there was a service standard he could trash he happily trashed it. If there was a price to be gouged, he gouged it.
Horne should have been shoved out along with Brian Souter. He had trashed everything that EastCoast had built up under Heidi Mottram (who as a water company CEO clearly has a strong business brain too).
But you can see why the current government would like a senior manager with a proven track record of slashing quality and ramping up prices.
The benefit of public ownership is that there is accountability at the ballot box for such behaviour- at least in theory. Not that I expect Labour to be much better.
Clearly this isn’t going to persuade more people to travel as it’s now almost universally more expensive to travel in these flows than it was a week ago, with less flexibility. However those arguing about it becoming cheaper to travel by road may be forgetting that fuel is not the only cost of travelling by road. Indeed to stay on topic though, would rail passengers want road users on their trains aswell? We are seeing lots of examples of “simple” advances now more expensive than the capped super off peak price. By encouraging more travellers we’ll see the quota used up quicker and then everyone will be paying the Anytime fare and face having to stand. It’s likely worth letting those who want to drive do so.
I refer you to post 995 of this thread where in its puff piece LNER explicitly states that a reason for this change is to even out "peaks and troughs". That implies that off-peak leads to overcrowding. That is the narrative they're pushing. Straight from the horses mouth, not me.
Your analogy is still irrelevant to this policy as off peak fares are less than 20% of fares. If demand really is outstripping supply on the ECML, the answer is to have fewer AP fares at those busy times (and more at the quieter times).
Ticket offices are a niche interest even amongst rail users, yet they managed to make the headlines.
I was just about to make that point in response to the suggestion that there's no votes in keeping rail users happy.
As I said above I'm not all that well informed politically, but the ticket office closures did indeed make the news and eventually the government seemed to clim down, which suggests to me that while this "trial" isn't getting much attention an attempt to remove fares regulation across the UK might stir up a bit more interest.
Which of course is nothing new and it's not just LNER. But up to now there's been an arrangement where the railway gets to charge what it likes in the peaks (even if that means trains running with lots of empty seats) but it has to offer regulated fares at some point during the day and all day at weekends - a modern version of parliamentary trains perhaps.
But now the plan appears to be just to let the operators charge what the market will bear at all times. A fundamental change to the railways. Perhaps a necessary one but it would be nice if it was brought in honestly rather than with lies about the intention being to make things better for the passengers.
I got really interested in this feature, nearly always visible on offpeak trains between London and Newcastle on weekdays. My guesstimate from actually counting empty reserved seats in my own coach was that up to 30% were regularly not occupied at the departure station shown on the reservation displays. It's a complete mystery how the deliberate elimination of affordable flexible tickets is going to actually fill all the seats available on the trains and maximise fare income at the same time. It's a bizarre solution to the wrong problem.
Maximising fare income doesn't have to mean filling seats.
It seems to work that way with airlines but it's very clearly not necessarily the case for rail.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Because overstaffing (during the flight) with stewards is mandatory for airlines for safety reasons (mostly for take off/landing), they have a far greater marginal opportunity to sell extra stuff that doesn't really apply to rail. Filling the seats gives you more of a target market. Rail doesn't, if you want to flog stuff you have to pay someone extra to do so.
Indeed didn't Ryanair once say ancillaries brought them more income than fares?
Right....but if they could half fill the plane with tickets at, say, £400 a pop that would still probably bring in more than someone in the cheap seats buying scratch cards and overpriced drink.
And budget airlines were running algorithms designed to fill every seat well before all the upselling stuff started.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
So now you want me to take LNER's comms on this at face value? Be serious; you've spent the whole thread implying they're dishonest by talking past their own comms pieces, as have most of us - including me. You yourself admit this is about price gouging yet you refer me to the spin piece to try and rebut one of my own points. The spin piece is BS, and you know it is. LNER trains aren't overcrowded because we know they temper loadings with the false "reservation required" stuff. The whole idea is to get more revenue from every passenger, not to have fewer of them, and to attempt to segment the market.
Haywain
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And it is more challenging for rail because a half empty train might be a packed train a couple of hours later.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
Budget airlines were, as their business model is to pile it high and sell it cheap. But budget airlines have always had the ancillaries as a key part of their business model- priority boarding goes back to the early days where seating on budget airlines was unallocated.
Legacy airlines are a lot more nuanced in their yield management. Loganair, for instance, charge eye-watering prices if you book a day or two in advance, yet IME their planes are rarely full. But their attitude is that one person paying £300 is better for them than three people paying £95.
It can be a vote-loser though. Hence why the government eventually caved over the RMT strikes - they saw that their attempt to drive a "vote Labour, get strikes" narrative had become "vote Tory, get strikes" in practice.
That's not my recollection.
I remember both Easyjet and Ryanair operating without paid priority boarding.
Ryanair was just a free for all scrum. Easyjet was done by boarding pass number so it just depended on where you were in the check in queue.
And in fact there was a time when Ryanair operated much more like a regular airline with seat allocation and even free catering on board.
Yes, because you keep saying that I'm the only person mentioning the narrative that this is about crowding (which we all know is BS) when clearly it is being pushed by LNER.
I don't understand how anyone could think I would suggest that the LNER piece should be taken at face value. The fact that I referred to it as a "puff piece" should have been a clue.
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Haywain
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If that were really the case the ASLEF dispute would have been settled too. I think the reality is that Mick Lynch was putting a message across in a far better way than anyone from ASLEF has managed to do. The government like the narrative of well paid, 4-day week, train drivers being greedy because they think the lower paid will side with them.