LNER's website could have been a great option to base a national ticketing website off.
) it would just issue Bletchley-Euston, Tube single (Oyster price), Paddington to Exeter and Exeter to Okehampton on one coupon.Quite, it seems self-evident to me that there should be one "official" source of railway tickets and then as many third-party retailers, with all the benefits that that brings, that the market can support. Heck it's not infrequently that we'll have someone saying they bought their tickets through "National Rail" as they haven't realised they've been transferred to a TOC site instead because quite logically National Rail should be a retailer!
I guess the same could be said about having TOCs in the first place instead of one single national train operator.
I think under franchising it was a requirement. However, while there is duplication, this also means there is variety in the interfaces offered and the benefits offered for using different sites. So moving to a centralised site would mean only one interface and would also probably mean losing CrossCountry's fee-free changes to Advance tickets, Southern's 'money back guarantee', GWR's offering rover tickets, LNER's Perks, and so on.
LNER is one of the better ones but that’s probably because they felt the need to respond to what Trainline had done. If there wasn’t competition then they probably wouldn’t put anywhere the investment they have into it.
Im not a real IT geek how does it know how much all the third party sites booking.com etc are charging to compare the prices then?
I don’t think this is feasible, that’s scraping data off other sites, it does dip into what could be an interesting idea though:
What variations are there in fares? It isn't as if the operators make different quotas for advance fares available to different booking engines at the moment.
Why? Having one booking engine, with the risk of it being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator level of functionality, would be terrible for customers.
I think the existence of a "comparison website" would start to encroach on Trainline's market dominance, even if it were fairly basic. The punters do love such things and would feel that they were stealing a march on all the other sites. The key, as ever, is to have a marketing budget. It has been heavy marketing that has got Trainline its current position. However, there are plenty of people out there seemingly willing to compete and to hand over money when they think they might make a fast buck. The only problem is would take some clever targeted marketing to get them to part with that upfront cash in the first place.
100% agree. A "National Rail" monolithic ticketing site would be detrimental in my view. There would also be very low consumer confidence that it would give the best deal on all train fares, too.
Because consumer confidence is so high already
Consumer confidence is very high with Trainline!Because consumer confidence is so high already
If you are booking cross london journeys there are massive differences on fares between the sites depending on how the different sites treat the journeys.
Misplaced confidence though! That being said in my world Trainline would still have every right to exist so people who prefer to have high perceived confidence but low actual confidence would be welcome to keep using
Does that include the consumers who bought what Trainline told them were "Open Returns" only to find that all or one portion were actually Day Returns that have disappeared?
Don't forget selling tickets for trains that don't exist!
Banning 3rd parties might not have been on the agenda however, there was/is real consternation amongst retailers over how much more retail control would be centralised ie; would they enforce all retailers to use an interface provided by the national retailer and essentially reduces independent retail to a role of a customer service agent (akin to a travel agent) with no room for innovation/differentiation of offering.
Currently retailers are able to differentiate the offering based on customer types and travel purpose. There's a lot of small but vital innovations in this space. More-so there's also a lot of work going on in the background right now around how to improve the end consumer offering within the existing imposed limitations to drive better value, increase flexibility and information clarity. Lastly there's also an ongoing focus on end-to-end accessibility being driven by independent retailer and journey planning solutions that wouldn't have come about if it was all centralised (due to intransigence in certain bodies that I will leave nameless).