Here here.
It’s almost the work of a psychopath to subject tourists - who either have endured or will endure the horrors of Manchester airport - to such complicated rules and fares.
Mr Burnham needs to bash some heads together.
The contrast to eg Schipol is astounding. Exit on level ground to the train hall, buy a single ticket for €23 to the other side of the country, and get on whatever train turns up next.
Absolutely. When you walk from Terminal 2 to the bus & train station it becomes abundantly clear what the priorities were when the thing was constructed. Could have put the train station adjacent to the terminals, or under them, but that would have meant moving a lot of car parking spaces further away. So they chose to stick it a 15 minute walk away. Then when you get there there's about seven different bus and coach companies all with their own ticketing arrangements as well as the pirate rail fares.
It's actually charitable to assume no consideration has been given to the convenience of people arriving in the UK at the airport and wishing to continue their journey on public transport. A level of complexity and user-unfriendliness has been achieved which, as far as I can make out, can only be the result of a special effort.
Tnhe anomaly you get is that advance fares for long distance journeys on local trains end up being cheaper than any fare available for the local journeys.
As it is, I don't think there are AP tickets for Crewe or Runcorn to Liverpool.
On the other side of the country there are AP fares from York to Leeds, but the walk up fares are very expensive, particularly if going only one way.
Well, there you go.
In the UK we think it's reasonable to address that phenomenon by having ticket restrictions that don't allow stopping short and enforcing these with draconian fines and threats of prosecution. In a sane world the regulator would simply tell operators they couldn't have such a restriction (and that they couldn't sell the more expensive ticket without telling the customer about the cheaper one that, in the absence of a stopping short exclusion, would also be valid). And then we'd enforce
those rules with draconian fines and threats of litigation.