East Coast Journey Planner Error

[Bedpan]

I'm going to York from Hertford North next week. The National Rial Journey planner gives a fare of £38 for the 11.39 from Hertford North, changing to East Coast at Stevenage and again at Peterborough, which is fine. It then diverted me to the East Coast website to buy a ticket where yesterday it provided me with two options for travel on Wednesday, both overnight (00.47 and 01.38 I think it was) from HFN and both taking over 8 hours.

Today there are more options but the fare is shown as £45.50 on East Coast (still £38 on National Rail) and the route they show is....walk to Hertford East, train to Tottenham Hale, tube to Kings Cross etc which adds 54 mins to the journey time. If you try "not via London", it then tells you to walk to HFE and change at Broxbourne, Cambridge and Peterborough!

I bought a ticket for £38 from Virgin's website in the end, so fine, but what if I wasn't a railway enthusiast and I didn't know anything about railway routes? Its a pretty poor advert for East Coast, is misadvising travellers like this a common occurrence? (I have a pretty jaundiced view since I feel I was completely shafted by FCC due to several things that happened after they took over the Thameslink franchise, when Elaine Holt was their MD.

 

[yorkie]

There are engineering works next weekend.

If you're doing a day return, then I would have advised an Off Peak Day Return from Peterborough which is a bargain £30.50 valid on any train. You may even be able to get a GC train! HFN-PBO is £15.00

I'd also never advise using the National Rail website, because you can't buy tickets on it! And the itinerary it gives you is not sent to the booking site So you have to (almost) start again, making it utterly pointless

I agree it's a poor advert for the industry, but the rail industry has no interest whatsoever in making rail ticketing simpler. If they are forced to make it simpler you can guarantee it would be used to put prices up (evidence for this is that when they did so-called Simplification some TOCs including London Midland, Cross Country and others used it as an excuse to put fares up and they tried to hide the increases)

 

[Bedpan]

Thanks Yorkie, actually I'm going to collect a car for somebody and deliver it to Hertford, so its a single trip and I've bought a ticket now anyway. Maybe I shouldn't complain too much as I'll get the money back anyway - its an occasional (about once every six weeks on average) job I have where I get to go on a train AND get paid for it!