Date Change on Uncollected Advance Tickets

[Smylers]

Hello. For changing the dates on Advance tickets, any advice on whether we're better off collecting the tickets and then trying to change them, or to change them online first, with the system knowing that we haven't yet got our hands on the originals? I don't want to collect them and then find out that this would've been simpler if we'd not done so.

They were bought online from GWR, but haven't yet been collected. A friend's illness means we need to change the date of visiting them, and the tickets were more than £10 each — so changing the dates on them for £10 each (plus any increase in price) should be cheaper than just buying new ones, but I've never tried to change an Advance ticket before. GWR's site says:

If you have a paper ticket​

You can change your ticket when logged in to your account.


If your journey is more than five days away, we’ll send your new ticket to you – postal fees apply. Otherwise, you’ll need to visit a staffed ticket office.

The 5-day thing surprised me; why can't they do this in less time so long as you collect the new tickets yourself from a machine, like they do with buying new tickets?

Also, does the 5 days pertain to the original journey time or the new one? We're less than 5 days away from the booked journey, but the new date will be later than that.

And does the “staffed ticket office” specifically mean a GWR office, or will any operator's do? In practice Northern is the only one we can get to it. Previously I've encountered ticket offices declining to have anything to do with changes to tickets bought online, even with the same operator (for instance swapping a GWR ticket for travel on a strike day; a GWR ticket office would only sell me a new ticket for additional payment, telling me to claim a refund on the original bought on GWR.com).

Thanks.

(The journey is mostly with CrossCountry and I now see that we could've avoided the £10 fees if we'd bought directly on their website. I bought on GWR's because I pefer the MixingDeck interface and I naïvely thought that all tickets were the same whichever operator you bought them from. I'll make sure to buy CrossCountry Advances from CrossCountry in future — but that's no help today.)

 

[island]

The GWR website is correct. Their process for changing paper tickets is to issue an excess fare/supplement ticket along with new reservations. Ticket on Departure can't cope with this and so the excess tickets need to be posted, allowing 5 days (before the new journey date) for them to arrive.

Any competent ticket office which sells advance tickets will be able to change the paper tickets.

It's a pity they haven't adopted the approach of LNER and others which allows you to change uncollected paper tickets by making a new booking and refunding the old one less the £10 change fee.

 

[Smylers]

The GWR website is correct. Their process for changing paper tickets is to issue an excess fare/supplement ticket along with new reservations. Ticket on Departure can't cope with this and so the excess tickets need to be posted, allowing 5 days (before the new journey date) for them to arrive.

Thanks, Island. That (sort-of) makes sense.

Any competent ticket office which sells advance tickets will be able to change the paper tickets.

I guess we're about to find out how competent our local ticket office is then!

It's a pity they haven't adopted the approach of LNER and others which allows you to change uncollected paper tickets by making a new booking and refunding the old one less the £10 change fee.

Yeah, that's what I was expecting them to do, and why I was cautious about collecting the tickets and thereby removing their ability to do that.

Update: Actually I ended up making the changes on GWR's website, because cheap Advance tickets were disappearing fast and I didn't want to wait till tomorrow for a ticket office to be open.

No charge for posting the new tickets (even though GWR normally charge £1 for tickets by post) and, surprisingly, I didn't get charged the £10 admin fee for either ticket either: one of them was completely free and the other just the difference in price — so overall that was far less costly than I was expecting.

Anybody got any ideas why the £10s weren't charged? GWR's website clearly states it will be (“The difference between the price paid and cost of the next suitable fare for the journey is payable, plus a £10 administration fee per person”, on the link above), and CrossCountry's free amendment's have 3 steps, including buying through their site or app. I'm not complaining — just puzzled!