I am going to be writing to the ORR about this.
You are entitled to catch any train in the UK if you have an appropriate ticket for that service. That does not have to be advance ticket with a seat reservation. You do not need a seat reservation to travel. If you turn up to a train without a seat reservation you take your chances with getting a seat.
The current situation is ridiculous. I have taken a decision not to have a car and use the train as a method of transport, not to pre-plan the odd day out. It doesn’t function as a method of transport if you are locked out of buying a ticket at the main points of sale.
The way it should work is as I think LNER does it where you are told there are no reserved seats available and so you are not guaranteed a seat, but the fare is still available. It is a lie to say it is not available because that is not true and the TOCs know it not to be true. That is what a lie is.
If trains are ‘selling out’ then the TOCs need to stop selling as many promotional advance fares whilst they run reduced timetables, to allow more space for full fare paying passengers who need to use the service as a system of transport. Otherwise people just stop being able to rely on it and so go and buy cars.
It has also come in as an unannounced incremental change and in some TOCs only.
I don’t care about mixing desks etc etc. All ticket points of sales should be offering the full price fares, with s warning on seat availability if necessary.
Also, these trains are not fullly booked, they have unreserved carriages. So that is also a lie. I was on a so called fully booked Avanti service last week and the unreserved carriage was half empty.
The ORR has the following function:
- making sure that train operating companies provide reliable and timely passenger information for planning travel – and take action when things go wrong
That is clearly not happening with this ‘sold out’ nonsense.
Also every pound of lost revenue with this mess, strikes etc is a pound less in the pot to pay anybody for anything. If demand is super high, throttle back on advance fares, get as many higher paying passengers as you can on there, make some bloody money. We have plenty of railcards to give decent discounts to relevant groups.
If you want to get even more tickets out for sale, shift the advance fares onto the super peak services where there seems to be plenty of room available. I just did a search for a couple of Avanti routes for next week. Guess what, loads of standard class availability at anytime peak fares, then when you get into the off peak, it suddenly dries up and the site is saying only standard premium or first are available.
If peak anytime demand recovers (I don’t think it ever will in the new world), then you can wind down the advance fares on those services without any fuss at all and in the meantime you can price them at around the same as full price off peak.
None if this is remotely rocket science. It just seems that all in involved can’t really be arsed working together to get the detail right.
