If I recall correctly, it almost sort of was back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, being one of the orginal online sales channel (and visibly the most promoted one). And that has well and truly stuck in the minds of the public.
-
Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Great British Railways announcement causes Trainline shares to tumble
- Thread starter Grumpy Git
- Start date
- Status
If I recall correctly, it almost sort of was back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, being one of the orginal online sales channel (and visibly the most promoted one). And that has well and truly stuck in the minds of the public.
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It was set up by Virgin Trains, initially as a telesales service then online. It was the first by a long way. They later spun it out as its own thing.
tbtc
Veteran Member
I'm not sure why there's so much hate for Trainline on here - they've grown the travel market, they've advertised significantly to encourage more journeys, they've not made any dishonest claims - yet they really seem to wind people up!
There are plenty of markets where people are "happy" to pay more than the cheapest price - look at how people buy full brand Paracetamol products even though the Supermarket "saver" range contains exactly the same active ingredients - I think that there must be a few people out there who don't mind paying a quid over-the-odds as part of spending over a hundred pounds on train tickets - if you want to get angry about anything, get angry about why the train tickets cost so much rather than the fact that a website is charging a pound to cover the cost of printing and posting tickets to your door
That seems a fair summary - I think that competition will be harder for them going forward (as there's one dominant Government site, rather than disparate TOC websites)
At the moment we're expecting "simplification", but there will always be oddities (given the way that our messy network allows multiple ways of getting from A-Z, which may mean that you can start/finish early on a cheaper ticket - plus the fact that fares in PTE areas are heavily subsidised meaning it may be cheaper to split tickets at the boundary) and I can't see the "promise" to simplify things being quite as robust in reality when the Government realise how many people will be annoyed by removal of some tickets (e.g. will any/many people sit on a 350 from Crewe to London if there's no financial incentive to forgo the much faster/frequent 390s from Crewe to London?)
It's a brand that a lot of people trust (in a railway environment that's been full of what people like to call Fear/ Uncertainty/ Doubt) - if Trainline disappeared then the number of tickets sold overall would go down
If the average man in the street thinks this then it's possibly because Trainline have been good at advertising and encouraging people to buy tickets (growing the market), whereas "National Rail" haven't sold tickets and individual TOCs have only been interested in selling tickets for *their* journeys
Different versions of "Northern" in this neck of the woods have taken out space in newspapers etc to advertise local journeys that I could book on their website - and then when I go on their website I've seen suggestions for these journeys too - but I can't recall ever seeing something in a Northern advert or on the website encouraging me to book a journey to London/ Wales/ Scotland, even though they'd get their 10% commission for flogging the ticket - IMHO individual TOCs have only focussed on journeys "local" to that TOC
I don't think that any other players in the market can complain if someone else has come along and presented a "unified" site that you can use for all sorts of journeys - if we are talking the "average man in the street" then I'd guess that they may well be under the impression that the TPE website only sells journeys in that area, the Chiltern website only sells journeys in that area etc etc
There's clearly been a gap in the market for a simple "one size fits all" site that caters to a diverse number of journeys - rather than having to register with several different websites every time you want to travel to somewhere different
Just my opinion but I don't think we can blame Trainline for occupying a space that none of the Government/ TOC organisations seemed interested in supplying
There are plenty of markets where people are "happy" to pay more than the cheapest price - look at how people buy full brand Paracetamol products even though the Supermarket "saver" range contains exactly the same active ingredients - I think that there must be a few people out there who don't mind paying a quid over-the-odds as part of spending over a hundred pounds on train tickets - if you want to get angry about anything, get angry about why the train tickets cost so much rather than the fact that a website is charging a pound to cover the cost of printing and posting tickets to your door
That seems a fair summary - I think that competition will be harder for them going forward (as there's one dominant Government site, rather than disparate TOC websites)
At the moment we're expecting "simplification", but there will always be oddities (given the way that our messy network allows multiple ways of getting from A-Z, which may mean that you can start/finish early on a cheaper ticket - plus the fact that fares in PTE areas are heavily subsidised meaning it may be cheaper to split tickets at the boundary) and I can't see the "promise" to simplify things being quite as robust in reality when the Government realise how many people will be annoyed by removal of some tickets (e.g. will any/many people sit on a 350 from Crewe to London if there's no financial incentive to forgo the much faster/frequent 390s from Crewe to London?)
It's a brand that a lot of people trust (in a railway environment that's been full of what people like to call Fear/ Uncertainty/ Doubt) - if Trainline disappeared then the number of tickets sold overall would go down
If the average man in the street thinks this then it's possibly because Trainline have been good at advertising and encouraging people to buy tickets (growing the market), whereas "National Rail" haven't sold tickets and individual TOCs have only been interested in selling tickets for *their* journeys
Different versions of "Northern" in this neck of the woods have taken out space in newspapers etc to advertise local journeys that I could book on their website - and then when I go on their website I've seen suggestions for these journeys too - but I can't recall ever seeing something in a Northern advert or on the website encouraging me to book a journey to London/ Wales/ Scotland, even though they'd get their 10% commission for flogging the ticket - IMHO individual TOCs have only focussed on journeys "local" to that TOC
I don't think that any other players in the market can complain if someone else has come along and presented a "unified" site that you can use for all sorts of journeys - if we are talking the "average man in the street" then I'd guess that they may well be under the impression that the TPE website only sells journeys in that area, the Chiltern website only sells journeys in that area etc etc
There's clearly been a gap in the market for a simple "one size fits all" site that caters to a diverse number of journeys - rather than having to register with several different websites every time you want to travel to somewhere different
Just my opinion but I don't think we can blame Trainline for occupying a space that none of the Government/ TOC organisations seemed interested in supplying
The same mindset of people that dislike the likes of Heathrow Express - they personally may not use it due to the expense, but alot of people are genuinely attracted to the product that it offers, and are prepared to pay for it. A sort of "shop window".
The only realt "fault" of Trainline is the booking fee. Which is hardly unheard of in life (e.g. Ticketmaster) and folk generally accept without question.
I agree quite a lot of that. The Trainline may not have made any dishonest claims but they certainly have made quite a few at the very least disingenuous claims over the years. They are hardly upfront about their fees either.
Wallsendmag
Established Member
Plus of course there is the fact that Trainline supply a lot of whitelabel sites to TOCs , presumably they'll lose that income.
The simple answer is the general public's sentiment to the railway that fares are too complex and that the railway is out to trick them into paying more than they have to. By having only one fare outlet it addresses that sentiment.
Even yesterday, someone posted in another thread that ticket machine interfaces are too complicated - stuff needs to be 'dumbed down' to the lowest common denominator level to please the widest range of people.
Overall (and without any internal knowledge or figures) I'd guess around 30% of their business is likely to disappear, so the share price drops aren't insane.
Obviously they could get the GBR website contract (although they are possibly a bit too Scottish to fit in with the Greater Englandshire brand image). They could equally fail to respond to the loss of TOC business correctly and not contract costs at the right rate.
Alternatively GBR could further squeeze the commission so that only the business travel unit survives. There's a lot of unknowns, and figuring out an appropriate price or holding is hard right now.
I think this is illustrative of the wider point: people are willing to pay for what they consider adds value, and marketing/brand identity can play a large part in that.
For example, my employer’s travel policy actively encourages us to use Heathrow Express, but will not in the main reimburse the equivalent non-HEx Oyster fare because it is below our expenses claim limit.
Similarly, I discovered recently that there is no policy on bus or coach travel at all - I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was the first person to ever try to claim that back on expenses because the mindset of almost all of my colleagues is such that they would never even think of catching a bus.
Last edited:
Isn't the HEx Oyster fare the same as the walkup paper ticket fare?
In West Yorkshire for my journey (to Harrogate) a weekly point to point rail season ticket would cost £53.80...yet a Zone 1-6 'MCard' product, allowing me unlimited rail travel anywhere in West Yorkshire and as far as Harrogate is actually CHEAPER at £50.10!
The non-HEx Oyster fare
I think this is the only physical advert I've seen like that and even then it's not quite what you've suggested
Northern advert at Bradford, March 2014
Alt text: Don't get fleeced. Avoid TheTrainLine's booking fees. Buy train tickets with no fees from northernrail.org northernrail.org/nofees
Wallsendmag
Established Member
Isn’t Northern’s site a Trainline white label ?
alistairlees
Established Member
- Joined
- 29 Dec 2016
- Messages
- 4,057
It wasn’t then
It would certainly make more sense to have one basic ticketing/booking system, that is built in such a way that other developers can build their own skinned app around it to offer within their own travel apps.
That's how it works now to a certain degree.
In theory yes, but in reality it’s good to have alternatives that allow additional time at interchanges, or are able to sell a tickets with an itinerary with a specific stop.
That's basically how the Deutsche Bahn journey planner works. A "simple" interface bit with some quite detailed "Advanced" options.
gray1404
Established Member
Will Merseyrail be taken over by GBR?
What do we expect to see happen to the LNR/WMT fares between Liverpool and London?
What do we expect to see happen to the LNR/WMT fares between Liverpool and London?
But different sites can customise what they offer accordingly. I would hate it for there to be only one site you can book through, especially if designed by people with no UI/UX skills.
For me the issue is that Trainline's marketing leads otherwise intelligent people to honestly believe that Trainline can give them a better deal than by booking elsewhere - whereas that is almost never the case.
People think that the 'savings' Trainline promotes derive from buying your ticket from Trainline, rather than from buying an Advance ticket which you could equally buy at a ticket office or fee-free via a TOC.
Their advertising may these days stay the right side of the line in regulatory terms, but it doesn't sit well with me.
Let's hope that different sites are allowed. I can see everything being 'dumbed down', they'll call it simplification. You've only got to look at the NRE to see what we could be facing into....
I'm not sure what the best thread for this comment is, but I am concerned that we will lose some of the opportunities that the wide range of companies offering ticket booking currently allows, if we move to a single source of ticket sales. The most valuable of these is XC's free changes to advance tickets policy, but there are other niche benefits like free postage or advanced routing options that would probably be wiped away with a single provider, however good that provider may be.
Haywain
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 3 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 20,067
That’s fair comment. Progress in ticketing has been one of the things that has suffered as a result of having to get 25-ish companies to agree on any changes. A single company won’t have those problems.
Tazi Hupefi
Established Member
No idea about Merseyrail but the report seems to indicate an end to the operator specific fares as it seems to indicate that they will end the confusion they cause passengers.
I would imagine they will be replaced by train specific Advance tickets, so you are always sure precisely what train you can use, but at the same time, still get a decent price. You can't really have operator specific tickets surely anyway if to the passenger, it's supposed to appear as one big one!
Wallsendmag
Established Member
We just have to make sure that the system used has all these options available, we are trying our best to convince the people that matter , honest.
I'm assuming, possibly wrongly, that route-specific tickets will still be fine, as under BR. I don't really trust the current shower not to stop all walk-up tickets on intercity routes though. You can just picture them deciding that if you can't do it by tapping in and out then it's reservation-only.
gray1404
Established Member
I think the loss of the current LNR/WMT walk up fares will be a massive blow for fares on the WCML. They provide an attractive to the Any Permitted fares priced by Avanti without the need to book in Advance of specify which train one is to travel on.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Those ones provide genuine market differentiation, so might well stay as "local trains only" or some such. Or Advances.
- Status