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Cheapest Fare Banbury to St Anne’s and Banbury to Shanklin (I of Wight)

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XC victim

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hi, I have got 2 journeys I need to make in the coming weeks.

I wish to book tickets through CrossCountry as I am registered with them and always get my tickets through them, and I want to reserve seats on the XC services using there seat selector.

1st Journey
Banbury to St Anne’s on 1st June returning 4th June.

2nd Journey
Banbury to Shanklin (I of W) on 10th August returning on 17th August.

Does anyone know what the cheapest tickets for these journeys will be (i.e. split fares etc). I could probably use advance tickets if they are for correct times of day.

Also is there anywhere I can find this information without asking on here.

Many thanks in advance
 
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Fawkes Cat

Fawkes Cat

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XC victim said:
Thanks, I do use Trainsplit but I really don’t want to buy tickets through that site. Is there no way I can just find out the cheapest fare for a journey without having to use the Trainsplit (and similar) sites?
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Hopefully someone will be along shortly to put me right, but websites to generate split tickets take time and effort to create - so it's fairly unlikely that there's one around which won't seek to profit from the creator's effort by trying to sell you your train tickets.

So you can either ask here, where the help is free but depends on our knowledge, or use a website and put up with them trying to sell you a ticket.
 
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JamesT

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The slightly cheeky thing to do is stick your journey into trainsplit, this will spit out a list of trains and tickets en route to trying to sell them to you. You note those down and go and buy them from your preferred vendor and cancel out of trainsplit before it gets to the payment stage for them.
Of course if everyone does that then sites like trainsplit will fairly quickly go out of business.
 
MikeWh

MikeWh

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JamesT said:
The slightly cheeky thing to do is stick your journey into trainsplit, this will spit out a list of trains and tickets en route to trying to sell them to you. You note those down and go and buy them from your preferred vendor and cancel out of trainsplit before it gets to the payment stage for them.
Of course if everyone does that then sites like trainsplit will fairly quickly go out of business.
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You also miss out on other benefits. If you have to change tickets then trainsplit only charge 1 admin fee for the journey. They will also assist you in case of any disputes when using the tickets.
 
X

XC victim

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MikeWh said:
You also miss out on other benefits. If you have to change tickets then trainsplit only charge 1 admin fee for the journey. They will also assist you in case of any disputes when using the tickets.
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The problem I have is that especially when travelling down to the Isle of Man I am travelling as part of a family group with young children so I want to make sure that we all have seats close together. That is why I use the XC site so I can use the seat selector. If you don’t use this facility you generally end up with reserved seats spread randomly and not in a group.

I will probably just end up paying for standard off peak tickets as I usually do, just wish there was someway of finding the cheapest tickets available
 
ForTheLoveOf

ForTheLoveOf

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XC victim said:
The problem I have is that especially when travelling down to the Isle of Man I am travelling as part of a family group with young children so I want to make sure that we all have seats close together. That is why I use the XC site so I can use the seat selector. If you don’t use this facility you generally end up with reserved seats spread randomly and not in a group.

I will probably just end up paying for standard off peak tickets
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There are no through tickets from Banbury to Shanklin, so you have no choice but to split tickets.

You can get seat reservations that are next to each other by asking CrossCountry on Twitter. Have a look on the seat map and tell them the seat numbers you want. Easy!
 
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swt_passenger

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Is Banbury missing due to some sort of admin error? Just checked a random selection of other stations on the route and they’re all there as you’d expect, eg Oxford, Heyford, Leamington Spa...
 
ForTheLoveOf

ForTheLoveOf

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swt_passenger said:
Is Banbury missing due to some sort of admin error? Just checked a random selection of other stations on the route and they’re all there as you’d expect, eg Oxford, Heyford, Leamington Spa...
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I doubt it's an intentional error, no, but it is a bit of an odd one.

A set of fares from Banbury to Sandown was defined at NFM64 (1996), being either route Any Permitted or route Not via London. The inclusion of a Network AwayDay Return suggests that this was set by what would then have been the Thames & Chiltern subsector of NSE. However, fast forward to NFM01 (2007) and the fares to Sandown cease to exist. I don't know what the reasoning behind this is.

Both at NFM, as well as through to the present day, fares are defined from Banbury to Ryde, set by Chiltern. I really don't see why these survived but not the ones to Sandown (yes, they are separate flows but that's not a legitimate explanation for the deletion of a flow!).

Perhaps Chiltern will grace passengers such as @XC victim with a through fare to Sandown upon reading this thread...
 
kieron

kieron

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ForTheLoveOf said:
There are no through tickets from Banbury to Shanklin, so you have no choice but to split tickets.
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You can't buy a Banbury-Shanklin ticket, but you don't have to split tickets as you can buy a ticket which is valid via Banbury to Shanklin, and permits you to break your journey. Leamington-Shanklin isn't that useful for XC victim as it's only available as a "via London" ticket, but a Bicester North-Shanklin ticket would be fine.

I couldn't get the Crosscountry site to sell a ticket via Basingstoke to anywhere beyond Smallbrook Junction (I could with GWR), so getting the tickets and reservations separately may be needed here.
 
X

XC victim

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Many thanks for the responses. I usually just purchase off peak returns for any journeys I make. It was only because I couldn’t purchase a through ticket to Shanklin that I considered getting split tickets. I have asked Chiltern on Twitter why there was no through ticket but I got no response. It does annoy me that there is nowhere passengers can find out what the cheapest ticket for their journey is.
 
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Joe Paxton

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XC victim said:
Many thanks for the responses. I usually just purchase off peak returns for any journeys I make. It was only because I couldn’t purchase a through ticket to Shanklin that I considered getting split tickets. I have asked Chiltern on Twitter why there was no through ticket but I got no response. It does annoy me that there is nowhere passengers can find out what the cheapest ticket for their journey is.
Click to expand...

If you have the time, energy and inclination you could always create such a tool yourself...
 
ForTheLoveOf

ForTheLoveOf

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XC victim said:
It does annoy me that there is nowhere passengers can find out what the cheapest ticket for their journey is.
Click to expand...
TrainSplit does a pretty good job of finding the cheapest ticket(s) for a given journey. Not sure what the issue is with using it then!
 
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