'Available' as opposed to 'Available if Not Occupied'

[ZL exile]

Doesn’t help matters that a booking service we used in a previous life always insisted on reserving a seat for you, even though you hadn’t specified a travel time, only that I need to travel in these time bands, to a get the type of ticket you required.

 

[Meerkat]

I've long thought this. Charge £2 for reservations to discourage people doing them "just in case" and give £1 back for cancelling an unneeded one would be how I'd do it. Financial incentives, even small ones (see the "bag tax"), do work.

Unused reservations are presumably mainly either by people with Anytime tickets or multiple advances?? In which case likely on expenses and therefore not going to gain from getting a quid back here and there.
Or by people who have a reservation but then find a better seat free, by which time it’s too late to usefully cancel a lot of those reservations (and they wouldn’t do it unless they could reserve the seat they had found, or they would risk it getting reserved out from under them at later stops)

 

[gg1]

I suspect a fair portion of the seat reservation no shows are business travellers.

The online booking system my employer users requires you to select both outbound and return journeys. Only after you select these journeys are you given the option of choosing the type of ticket you want, with an open ticket being one of the options. After you select the ticket the next stage of the process is seat reservations, by default the system reserves seats on the previously selected journeys, you have to manually de-select them if you don't want reservations.