Split Tickets..

Last year, I bought a car in Newcastle. Nothing strange there.

What is slightly strange is I live in Swindon. Trainfare to collect me car is going to cost a lot.

Especially as I bought the car midweek and booked the ticket for the next Saturday online on me phone. I am not good at online stuff.

Anyhoo. I was lucky enough to need a ticket when the XC services where stopping at Swindon. This was an amazing chance to get from Swindon to York without changing trains!

My question is,

With the spilt ticket, I was supposed to swap seats quite a few times, even though the seat I sat in at Swindon, I sat in until I got off for a smoke at York. It wasn't reserved until I got off (eventually) at Newcastle

Methinks that I should have swapped seats at Cheltenham, Brum, Derby, Chesterfield and York.

Why did the Split Ticket try to make me swap seats?

I had that on a recent Virgin service Milton Keynes to Chester. (It was the Euston to Holyhead train).

I was supposed to change seats at Nuneaton, but on boarding at Milton Keynes (wrong carriage) I just found an available seat (there were plenty), and sat there throughout.

I think it’s because the system shows some seats reserved at different points throughout the journey. This anomaly is particularly prevalent on spilt tickets.

It’s just pot luck really, especially on a longer journey. At least if you have got those reservations you know you will have somewhere to sit even if it means moving now and then.

If you use TrainSplit, it will try and prevent this from happening and where possible issue a single seat reservation to cover multiple split tickets

Well if you are using split tickets on a XC train then you can just see what the cheapest split tickets are, then buy the tickets on the XC website because on the XC website you can manually select your seat and ensure that its the same seat on each part of your journey on that particular train. Avoids any additional fees too

maniacmartin said:

If you use TrainSplit, it will try and prevent this from happening and where possible issue a single seat reservation to cover multiple split tickets

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Yes it tries but it's not always possible:

SickyNicky said:

One issue is that certain ticket types are restricted to certain areas of the train when the NRS suggests seats, making it impossible to keep the same seat throughout. Being able to select your own seat resolves this, and we're going to be offering that as soon as we practicably can.

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SickyNicky said:

Just to confirm, although we try, at the moment some TOCs have seating policies that make it hard or impossible to keep the same seat throughout.

We're working on that, but it's not going to be "fixed" any time soon. Sorry!

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tommy2215 said:

Well if you are using split tickets on a XC train then you can just see what the cheapest split tickets are, then buy the tickets on the XC website because on the XC website you can manually select your seat and ensure that its the same seat on each part of your journey on that particular train. Avoids any additional fees too

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I did that the other day for my parents, however it took me about 30 minutes of 'admin' work, and they still had to swap seats half way through the journey as some of the tickets were the last in the tier, meaning they cannot be changed!

I had to add each ticket manually, making sure that the date and time was definitely correct. If you select TOD, you get a separate code for every individual ticket, and this would have incurred a booking fee. I selected e-tickets as this was better for them, however XC sent a separate email for each set of tickets, so they have about 6 emails, each with 2 PDFs, making 12 PDFs in total.

So any savings over a site that takes 10% of the fee were well and truly wiped out by the faffing about!

Another issue is that the National Reservation System is unable to reserve a specific seat on more than 3 sections of any train's journey, so on a several-split journey like the OP's, it physically isn't possible - no matter how good the booking system - to get a reservation in the same seat throughout. The only alternative is to split less (and thereby pay a higher fare), or to go to a booking office and to try to get a through reservation there. Clearly - neither are good options for most people.