TheManOnThe172
Member
- Joined
- 1 Aug 2014
- Messages
- 344
The heavy cancellation charges for even flexible tickets can make the railway a hostile player at troubled times.
There's very nasty flooding around Matlock this morning. I've just passed blue-light mountain rescue and police vehicles, and a helicopter was hovering over Peak Rail's station at Darley Dale. The A6 is closed with only a tiny backroad as a diversion.
Yet I have just helped add to the congestion on that route, and taken a scarce high-ground parking space in Matlock - to make a completely discretionary journey on flexible tickets - because the trains are still running and I face a stiff penalty if I do not use the tickets I booked yesterday afternoon.
Is there any justification for a default of £10 cancellation on flexible tickets booked but not collected? If I order an item for collection from Screwfix but never make it to the store, the money gets refunded in full. And many other retailers who incur costs from non-collected orders also judge it a cost worth bearing to make online ordering attractive to customers. A non-collected rail ticket has far lower cost but is treated far less kindly.
Even if the inefficiency (or greed?) of the industry makes no-cost cancellation unthinkable as a norm, how about announcing such an amnesty at times when the wider community is facing challenges that would be helped by avoiding unnecessary travel?
There's very nasty flooding around Matlock this morning. I've just passed blue-light mountain rescue and police vehicles, and a helicopter was hovering over Peak Rail's station at Darley Dale. The A6 is closed with only a tiny backroad as a diversion.
Yet I have just helped add to the congestion on that route, and taken a scarce high-ground parking space in Matlock - to make a completely discretionary journey on flexible tickets - because the trains are still running and I face a stiff penalty if I do not use the tickets I booked yesterday afternoon.
Is there any justification for a default of £10 cancellation on flexible tickets booked but not collected? If I order an item for collection from Screwfix but never make it to the store, the money gets refunded in full. And many other retailers who incur costs from non-collected orders also judge it a cost worth bearing to make online ordering attractive to customers. A non-collected rail ticket has far lower cost but is treated far less kindly.
Even if the inefficiency (or greed?) of the industry makes no-cost cancellation unthinkable as a norm, how about announcing such an amnesty at times when the wider community is facing challenges that would be helped by avoiding unnecessary travel?