Avanti reservations unavailable

[yorkie]

According to this...

Seat Reservations On the Train | National Rail

Reserve a seat on your train and you will be sitting pretty! Some train companies offer free seat reservations on their services, mostly for longer journeys. Find out what you need to know.

www.nationalrail.co.uk

Saturday service:​

10 July

Sunday service:​

11 July

Monday to Friday service:​

6 August

Latest time of reservation:​

Customers can make a seat reservation up to 10 minutes before departure from a station on all services (subject to availability).

Notes:​

Reservations are closed for the following dates:

• 29 to 31 May.
• 5 and 6 June.
• 13 June.
• 19 and 20 June.
• 3 and 4 July.

...there should be nothing stopping reservations being available for Thursday 17th June.

However I am unable to book the 0949 Carlisle to Crewe Avanti service for this date (see attached).

It's actually part of a longer journey from Carluke to Stafford, but I narrowed down the issue to the above service.

The train in question is reserveable between Glasgow and Carlisle; looking at the seat selector on Trainsplit, it's coming up with 5 reserveable standard class coaches (A to F) with around 25 seats available.

Could it be that the train is already fully booked from Carlisle? Can anyone work out how many seats are actually reserved between Carlisle and Crewe? Could Avanti open up more seats for booking, or is that it?

I can't see any easy way for a passenger to know if trains are not yet open for booking, or are already fully booked.

This problem is not unique to Avanti; I see issues are occuring with XC ( https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/oxford-scotland-fares-in-late-may-early-june.217481/ ) as well as LNER.

So I am aware it is a wider issue, but if anyone can help with this particular journey that would be great

Many thanks in advance!

 

[Haywain]

Could it be that the train is already fully booked from Carlisle?

You could test this by trying to book for shorter segments of the journey.

 

[JB75029]

Imagine this might have something to do with the England vs Scotland game at Wembley on the 18th - wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Scots have already booked trains down the day before in the hope of getting a ticket to the game through the ballot!

 

[181]

I can't shed any light on the OP's particular journey, but I can report some more Avanti reservation oddities.

As I've said on 'my' thread that's linked to by the OP of this one:

This problem is not unique to Avanti; I see issues are occuring with XC ( https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/oxford-scotland-fares-in-late-may-early-june.217481/ ) as well as LNER.

I've managed to make a booking for a version of the journey I wish to make, avoiding XC altogether on the outward journey. However, there appear to be issues with Avanti reservations -- both itineraries not being offered, and an itinerary without a reservation on a train where reservations are (I thought) compulsory.

My journey is from Oxford to Stirling and back with a flexible (non-Advance) ticket, booked through Trainsplit (using the new interface) but not actually splitting. For the return journey on Friday 4th June I found that no, or at least very few, itineraries were offered for the usual route down the WCML on Avanti's Scotland-Birmingham-London trains -- almost everything was either on LNER and XC via York (I chose one of these and got a full set of reservations), or on TPE and XC via Manchester (including a few options with a change at Stoke-on-Trent, which I think may have included a short Avanti leg but not on the Scotland route). This is consistent with there being a general problem with Avanti reservations.

For my outward journey on Friday 28th May I was given an itinerary including travel from Birmingham NS to Haymarket on the 1015 Edinburgh train (08.43 from Euston). Looking at the seat reservation information on Trainsplit at the prepayment stage, I noticed that it said that seats couldn't be reserved on Chiltern from Banbury to Birmingham, and said nothing about Birmingham-Haymarket; if I remember rightly it wasn't until I received the booking confirmation that I found that it said 'You have reserved a place on this service, but individual seat reservations are not possible' for Banbury-Birmingham and 'We weren't able to reserve any seats. You may be able to request reservations directly from Avanti West Coast via their Website or social media' for Birmingham-Haymarket.'

My understanding is that apart from LNER, TOCs are not generally enforcing compulsory reservations (although there is this incident reported from Euston) and that unless I'm particularly unlucky I should be able to travel OK; is that correct? Any suggestions on which coach is best? (I seem to remember that U and one other are normally unreserved, but maybe they will be full of people in the same position as me).

This comment in the Euston thread:

The 1031 to Preston this morning appears to be in the data as reservations available. If they are going to treat as recommended/compulsory they really should fix that.

makes me wonder whether some Avanti trains have escaped being designated as reservations compulsory and that's why I was offered an itinerary on this one.

(Mentioning @SickyNicky in case any of this is of interest for Trainsplit -- I didn't realise that the little pencil icon led to the seat selector).

 

[js517]

makes me wonder whether some Avanti trains have escaped being designated as reservations compulsory and that's why I was offered an itinerary on this one.

You're right - that service is "Reservations available" not "Reservations compulsory".

 

[hkstudent]

To follow up,
I am planning to buy a ticket from London to Oxenholme.
Is it possible to call the Avanti hotline to book 3 segments of seat reservations, like London - Rugby, Rugby - Warrington BQ, Warrington BQ - Oxenholme with one Off-Peak return London - Oxenholme ticket?

 

[Alex27]

A slightly separate issue, but I was recently trying to buy tickets on a (Chiltern) TVM for my family. The TVM seems to use some sort of journey planner system rather than just being able to select the product you want (not necessarily a bad thing for those less familiar with the network), however because of this it wouldn't sell me a ticket as the train we wished to travel on was 'fully booked' (I guess in terms of seat reservations?), even though we were using anytime tickets and there's me thinking they could be used anytimeThankfully the ticket office sorted us out

 

[js517]

A slightly separate issue, but I was recently trying to buy tickets on a (Chiltern) TVM for my family. The TVM seems to use some sort of journey planner system rather than just being able to select the product you want (not necessarily a bad thing for those less familiar with the network), however because of this it wouldn't sell me a ticket as the train we wished to travel on was 'fully booked' (I guess in terms of seat reservations?), even though we were using anytime tickets and there's me thinking they could be used anytimeThankfully the ticket office sorted us out

Did the ticket office manage to issue you seat reservations for the train that was 'sold out' on the machine?

 

[Alex27]

Did the ticket office manage to issue you seat reservations for the train that was 'sold out' on the machine?

Nope, they just sold us the tickets we wanted (it wasn't very busy at all in the end)