I think that would push a lot of passengers onto flights or coaches for long-distance journeys, unless you're proposing that flexible tickets from e.g. London to Glasgow should be £100 return.
I have made 9 single journeys involving LNER in the past year; if I remember rightly, only one was on an Advance ticket and all the rest were on Off-Peaks (and my actual journey had an off-peak ticket available, with no need for workarounds like buying a ticket for a longer journey). The time in advance for which I knew in principle I was likely to be making a journey varied from several weeks or more down to a few days; the time at which I knew which train I wanted to get varied from a couple of weeks or so down to when I arrived at the station. In most if not all cases, by that time there were no Advances available, or at least none that were cheaper than the off-peak.
I suspect that this change of habits by business travellers, and the resulting loss of revenue, may be at least partly why the railway industry feels the need to make life difficult for other passengers, in the hope that some of them can be nudged or forced into paying more.
Did the research include people not travelling by train as well as those that do? It seems unlikely that people are falling over themselves to pay more money (as can happen if removal of off-peaks removes the effective cap on Advances) for tickets that are so high-risk if plans change (do they all even realise that if they are delayed on the way to the station they will have to pay over £200 for a new ticket from London to Edinburgh?). It seems more likely that high demand on LNER is not a result of the new fare structure, but rather the reason they can get away with it, if (for the time being at least) the niche market of people who can either commit to a specific train weeks in advance or pay higher fares is big enough to fill the trains.
Advances as they have been used, to provide cheaper tickets for people prepared to reduce flexibility for a cheaper fare, probably are beneficial, but that's not the same as taking away the medium-priced flexible tickets that people have relied on for decades. Maybe the finances of the railway are such that it needs every penny it can get, and the loss of flexible long-distance travel will just have to be one of those things, like increased defence spending or the loss of defined benefit pensions, that we'll have to put up with in the modern world. But I'm not convinced that it's in the railways' long-term interests to impose upon themselves such a major competitive disadvantage compared with the flexibility of car travel.
And long may it remain so, but sadly there are pressures against it.
Unfortunately this is a very widespread problem. See Stafford - Newcastle or Stoke-on-Trent - Leeds as examples.
Both Avanti and Lumo offer only a tiny number of journeys per day. You receive very little choice over your times in exchange for your £190.
Whilst I don't agree with that LNER are doing, what makes it illegal? I do appreciate their is another thread on this but I don't have time to read all the posts to find the answer.
Most advances from London to Glasgow are around the £150 mark, and that is what I would propose the off-peak fare should become. Personally I think this fare should be much lower, around £100 as you suggest, but the need for the railway to make a profit probably puts a stop to that.
I'm not aware of it being murky or needing the courts. My understanding was that it had been stated multiple tickesg were allowed to makeup one journey and if you are delayed then it still counts as one journey. Assuming of course one allows the official minimum connection times between trains.
No, but the market is very different to longer distance travel, or indeed general travel in other places. The very volume of London commuter passengers distorts the statistics in how large a share of the market Advance fares are elsewhere.
Off-peak singles, splitting at Penrith (which shouldn't be necessary), are £122, and that amount is much higher than my own experience of London / Watford – Glasgow fares being closer to the £50 mark each way (if I hadn't been using a railcard). Admittedly I'm generally booking quite a few weeks in advance.
I meant that that specific type of simplification isn't useful; you might not want to be tied to one specific train, but there's tonnes of passengers who are willing to be in order to afford to travel at all. I think it's the same issue as LNER's abolition of off-peak fares; removing cheaper options which had previously worked relatively well for most people.
I am of the opinion regular people do not care that much about flexibility (if they were, then LCCs would be much less popular), they only care about price.
It is somewhat artificial scarcity but it is scarcity nonetheless. If XC and TPE had longer trains and LNER weren’t wasting so many 5 car sets we’d be in a different position.
Simplification in ticketing has always meant fare hikes, wherever in the world.
I suspect that a lot of passengers frequently don't know how much flexibility their ticket gives them even when they do pay for flexible tickets, even for clear ones like visiting York on the way from London to Edinburgh as well as less intuitive routes.
I don't believe that that makes any difference.
Off peak fares are regulated, which means they are not allowed to be increased by more than RPI+. Abolishing them and leaving the Anytime as the only walk up fare with at least the same utility and availability is effectively an unauthorised price increase.
I have done so to Newcastle, and my wife has to Edinburgh. Both distress purchases, with no idea when we were coming back, as the Grim Reaper runs to his own timetable.
It applies to anyone who needs flexibility on the time of travel, including a friend who choose the car instead of the train for this reason. Most people who can book in advance choose to fly from the South of England to Scotland.
LNER modernisation GATHERS PACE
Arrival of Azumas is a prominent landmark, LNER Managing ...www.modernrailways.com
Yes, the Anytime ticket is priced to dissuade people from buying it, absolutely. It will be bought as a distress purchase but nothing more, and the implementation of on-the-day advances even removes that for most people.
