They would struggle to compete with Avanti and the airlines when the journey time is inevitably so much longer that way.
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www.realtimetrains.co.uk
Travel northbound on a Monday or Tuesday. Travel southbound on a Tuesday or Wednesday. At all costs avoid bank holiday weeks, and the week either side of Easter. November will be pretty quiet, but if you want to do it when there's lots of light then you should go in May or June.
I'd rather charge as low as the competitor charges. As long as the Caledonian Sleeper is much more expensive than one night of Travelodge + the first easyJet from Gatwick on a Saturday, I will take the latter, as I did last weekend. Also, starting from Bournemouth, getting to Gatwick Airport is much cheaper than getting to London as well!
It's definitely one of the most interesting things about the Sleeper that even at these prices they can make some reasonable rates of occupancy on selling the experience. At £570 return they're competing with travelling on day trains at £185.70 and a hotel budget of £192.15 / night. I can see that there's in fact no shortage of mid range and upper mid range hotel rooms in some prime Glasgow and Edinburgh locations for less than £190 / night.
The question is how well loaded is the Sleeper at the current prices? If it’s pretty full, then dropping prices might simply be throwing away revenue from people willing to pay more with little opportunity to replace it.
The fact is that the sleeper hasn't had much in the way of business travellers since the mid eighties/early nineties even when it was dirt cheap. Its been a mainly leisure/ tourist operation in all the time I've been using and I'm old enough that my first trip was in a Mk1!
The Highlander, yes; the Lowlander, less so - there was decent business traffic on the Glasgow especially, but also on the Edinburgh, pre-Covid.
I'd agree there's more on the lowlander but it's still not much mostly southbound on sunday/Monday and Northbound Thursdays/Friday. The Glasgow portion had pre covid been in decline ever since the West Coast modernisation was completed. I recognise far more regulars on flights from Gatwick to Glasgow than I do on the sleeper.
Yet it has been full or nearly full every time I've used it. People like sleeper trains. They tolerate easyJet. We do not live in a rational world and I am happy people actively choose night trains above budget airlines.
Fort William is almost all leisure, but the Aberdeen portion has a lot of frequent travellers who split their time between there and London.
In this case the Caledonian Sleeper is priced correctly. Unfortunately this results in most travellers to use a environmentally damaging form of transport which can only be fixed by means of tax.
The Highlander is basically full nearly all the time, so the problem is not the price but the fact even a full length train is not enough capacity for demand. And there are solutions to people choosing to fly to Scotland which don't involve taxing them.
I hear so, although I have not been on the Aberdeen portion for several years.
Apart from taxing flying, what incentive can be made to travellers for a weekend out on a typical Friday evening - Sunday schedule to get off the plane but take night trains instead? Telling them to sit on a daytime high-speed train is not a solution unless a trip from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh can be feasibly done under 3 hours, such that it can be time-competitive with flying even a connection is needed to board the high speed train. Remember that, for those not living in inner London, getting to an airport is usually faster than getting to a London Terminal because there are multiple airports surrounding London. For example, for a traveller starting from Brighton, by the time he reaches Kings Cross to board a high speed train, he would already be in the air if he chose to fly instead.
Aberdeen's a lot further from Edinburgh (130ish miles) than Fort William is from Glasgow (100ish miles).
We've just established that the sleepers are basically full, very popular, many people's preferred mode, and also that they can charge what they like. The answer is surely for the surfeit in demand, to put on more Scottish sleepers - perhaps an earlier departure and subsidise the operation properly.
I don't really want to start a flying v rail debate again but there's really not much in it:
Why do you believe this does not apply to "priv pass" passengers?
