Advance tickets are a marketing device to sell seats that would otherwise stay empty. Sometimes the sales are a little slow so the number at low prices might be increased. At other times, they may reduce the number of lower price tickets if demand is high. It's no different to flight ticket selling. If you were happy with the price when you bought them, why worry about how much others have bought them for?
You'll have to wait until Dec 13th to involve him/her!
Thanks for pointing out that they admit to breaking consumer law in their T&Cs. Very useful if this was to go to court.
True though as this was the original point of purchase and the ticket office is operated by the same company, it's a useful starting point. It will be interesting to see what the ticket office say you should do next (and if they give advice that is contrary to consumer law, this should be noted as evidence), but almost certainly a complaint will need to be raised.
I would imagine that if there was a successful legal challenge, the wording would be subtly changed to allow it to go up or down.
This may have been true once, but it isn't really true any more. They are principally a commercial tool for yeild management. You'll have lots of people on Advance tickets these days, even on trains full and standing.
...and filling empty seats is one end of yield management, (as in maximising profit on a 'perishable' product). The other extreme is charging maximum prices for journeys to passengers that insist on travelling at a given time. They may have mistakenly slipped up on the wording, but lowering prices of airline tickets is common and so it may become on the railway. Indeed, there are bands of advance ticket prices (as shown on BR Fares website), and there's no reason why a lower price band cannot be released nearer the date of travel if sales plateau.
As I indicated above, a legal challenge might result in a change to the words, (like: "ticket prices will probably be more expensive nearer to the travel date".) There's nothing to stop that.
