Trainsplit seat selector issues with EMR

I'm trying to select seats on the 1113 Leicester to London next Friday, however I can only select seats in Coach E, as the rest of the carriages are "full" (using a Super Off Peak return)

However using an Advance ticket I can use any coach, even the supposedly unreserved coach D.

It’s probably the way the tickets are set up in NRS, rather than anything to do with TrainSplit.

This is a problem that we are actively working on. You may or may not be aware that each seat is configured to permit reservations for a range of fares. Those might be all valid fares fo the service, a election of them, or none at all. Right now we try quickly to reserve the first "available" seat in each carriage using the fare you have chosen. If we can book it we assume that this coach is ok for your fares and offer you all the seats that NRS says are available in it. If it doesn't then we assume that none of other seats wil either and exclude that coach.

This works ok on some services but really doesn't for other - the one you tried being one of them.

We are busy working on a major update that will provide you with accurate availability for your chosen fare in every seat, not just checking one seats an extrapolating out to the whole coach. I do not have a release date for this update yet, and when I do, TrainSplit will need to makes some changes to use our new function. But we will get this rolled out as quickly as possible. In the mean time, please bear with us where there are these problems...

As a stop-gap, I've made the change to no longer display coaches as "full" in this way based on the fare data. This will mean for e.g. this service, it's now possible to select many more seats than was previously possible - with the caveat being that the reservation may fail under the circumstances Ian has described (even if the seat looks available on the map).

If the reservation does fail, we will tell you and you'll have the opportunity to select and try another seat.

I appear to be hitting this same issue on LNER between Peterborough and Edinburgh (with a connecting service from/to Ipswich) with advance fares. More annoying is that the initial seat selection is coming up with seats in different coaches with the family railcard 2 adults and 1 child, and in one case it was different halves of a 10 coach Azuma.

I'm getting a sore hand trying to just find 3 seats that are adjacent never mind trying to find ones that are at a table to keep the child happy for the journey.

smsm1 said:

I appear to be hitting this same issue on LNER between Peterborough and Edinburgh (with a connecting service from/to Ipswich) with advance fares.

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By "this same issue" do you mean the coaches are showing as full? Or do you mean that you receive an error message no matter what seats you try to select?

Raileasy doesn't mention which seats it's chosen, thus I can't see if they are next to each other, or even in the same coach.

smsm1 said:

Raileasy doesn't mention which seats it's chosen, thus I can't see if they are next to each other, or even in the same coach.

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Just to clarify, are you buying from https://www.raileasy.co.uk/?

Adam Williams said:

By "this same issue" do you mean the coaches are showing as full? Or do you mean that you receive an error message no matter what seats you try to select?

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The latter, I'm getting an error message with any seats that I choose. Occasionally I can find a combination of 3 that work (I've found one for the return, not yet for the outward)

smsm1 said:

The latter, I'm getting an error message with any seats that I choose. Occasionally I can find a combination of 3 that work (I've found one for the return, not yet for the outward)

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Okay, yeah. Ian is still working on improving the accuracy of the seat availability information. I believe he's making good progress, but until that's done this is unfortunately a problem that's going to crop up. We'll correctly show these seats as unavailable once this work is done.

Appreciate the user experience is poor at present.

Adam Williams said:

Just to clarify, are you buying from https://www.raileasy.co.uk/?

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I've been looking and comparing the splits at both https://www.raileasy.co.uk/ and https://www.trainsplit.com/.

Raileasy has found a split on the outward that saves about a £1 for that direction, however with train split having the seat selector, and hopefully being able to have all of the family together, ideally at a table, being a higher priority, I'm preferring that site for the purchase at the moment. Raileasy does have a nicer UI for showing the full list of trains and fare options, particularly seeing more trains at the same time.

Adam Williams said:

Okay, yeah. Ian is still working on improving the accuracy of the seat availability information. I believe he's making good progress, but until that's done this is unfortunately a problem that's going to crop up. We'll correctly show these seats as unavailable once this work is done.

Appreciate the user experience is poor at present.

Click to expand...

Good to hear there's good progress.

I wonder if the last fares at that price point have been sold, as I'm not getting the error that the fare is no longer available.