I’d totally agree on the two halves thing. Had a great crew out of GLC on the red eye on Saturday. No catering at the start (they joined at Carlisle I think) but the TM made me some toast and had a chuckle about reaching the limit of her cooking skill. Her thought and good humour really left a great impression.
It is amazing how in days of QR codes, hundreds of auto responses, auto delay repay and perhaps notably just a complete lack of human interaction, those moments of just one human being kind to another seem all the more important.
However, it does make me ponder what an after thought in general Catering and customer service now is on Avanti. A PA early on that the shop was Cash only because of the WiFi issue, and then a further PA from a clearly exasperated staff member south of Preston that the Reset to try and restore card payment had failed, and another shortly after the float had gone and the shop was now closed.
You have to pity the staff who have to handle such conditions and obviously not fit for even the most basic testing day to day, and remembering the days of a full squad appearing to do a meal service for two and a half cars of 1st - Standard Premium was perhaps their first statement of intent, but the capacity is so tiny now their Attitude seems to be “well if they all complain, (which statistically they won’t) how much will the refunds even cost us” - probably less than the additional training cost of recruiting and keeping sufficient additional staff to provide the advertised service.
Historic train operators certainly had their faults, but it seems it is entirely lost on most of the current long distance operators, that rail should be a *NICE* way to travel - an opportunity to socialise with travelling companions or get some work done, or a restful, comfortable environment, rather than just a glorified long distance commuter service, and the details of customer service and catering (or indeed having the reasonable expectation of the train you book getting you to your destination at some time close to your arranged time) are really important to providing that experience to passengers who do have many other (often far cheaper) options available to them.
One wonders if there has ever been a statistical analysis of the passenger recovery post covid that has been boosted by strong reliability and customer service performance, or suppressed by poor reliability and customer service performance. Because that should matter to us all as taxpayers, from a route (largely unchanged) which was paying substantial premiums to DfT for the privilege of operating the service (ie Profitable) - that poor performance is now, it would seem to me, costing us all hard cash !