I'm talking about a scenario where there might be an extended period of travelling back and forth to see & help look after someone who is seriously and/or terminally ill. During the whole of that time things may be unpredictable and at any point one might not really know whether there are days, weeks or months to go.
It was part of the hare-brained single leg pricing initiative; all of the affected flows gained route restrictions to prevent their fares from being used on "unintended" routes. Of course, that had the effect of denying passengers the use of reasonable and longstanding permitted routes, including (most egregiously) Edinburgh to London via the WCML.
Is this basically so that they can collect 100% of the revenue from a ticket from Edinburgh to London whereas if it's any permitted, some proportion would go to other operators in the basis that a certain proportion of ticket holders would use those other routes?
Since it's a geographic rather than an operator restriction, the revenue is still split through ORCATS between all of the operators that feature in non-overtaken journeys on the East Coast Mainline (i.e. possibly including XC, TPE, Grand Central etc. depending on the time of day or day of the week). That being said, walk-up tickets make up a small proportion of overall revenue for these kinds of long-distance flows so most revenue will go directly to the relevant operator.
Other situations where you may have to travel at short notice include disruption to previous travel plans - broken down car, or let down by another operator.
There are loads of situations. I don’t understand why this point is even a debate. The concept that everybody knows what they are doing to the minute weeks in advance and there is no potential variation is just utterly ludicrous.
Of course, but as we have seen quite often there are no Advances left well before departure with the only ticket offered being the Anytime - whilst the withdrawal of the Super Off Peak was sugared by 'don't worry, Advances can be bought up to 5 mins before departure'.
Remember, this scheme is all about simplifying fares. How introducing extra restrictions ties in with that claim I'll never know.
It's just an extension of the general policy of making rail travel expensive though when it comes down to it. I strongly disagree with that policy but it applies very widely, beyond LNER.
Or timetables have yet to be confirmed, so all that's showing (other than on the LNER app/website) are walk up fares with no Advances.
Looks like the £86 fare is just a higher tier of Advance for the same train. Can't see any scenario in which it would make sense to buy this. LNER's supplier should be putting these tiers of Advances into a group or bucket so that only the cheapest one that's available is offered.
Maybe, but it's very naive to think that it all goes by the same route. The DfT may tell TOCs to make more money but it tellls them individually rather than collectively.
