Greater Anglia only weekend super-off-peak day return Cambridge to London

[arb]

According to both National Rail Enquiries and BRFares there is an £8.60 railcard discounted Greater Anglia only weekend super-off-peak day return from Cambridge to London.

After much frustration trying and failing to buy this from various websites where I have an account, I've come to conclusion that this ticket is only available on Greater Anglia's website (for which I'll need to register), and nowhere else. I assume that this means it's some kind of special promotional fare that Greater Anglia have introduced, and can only be sold by them.

Two questions:
1) Am I right?
2) Is there any way I could have deduced this from the BRFares page about the ticket, such that I wouldn't have spent ages trying to buy it from websites other than Greater Anglia?

 

[JB_B]

As far as I can tell trainsplit.com has no problem selling this ticket for this Saturday (once you click on the 'Value' option) - I've not looked at other retailers.

 

[arb]

It seems that CrossCountry will also sell it. But not Great Northern, Virgin, LNER, Chiltern or GWR.

 

[yorkie]

Not all booking engines can sell all fares. There can be numerous reasons for this.

I know Trainsplit aims to sell all tickets that train companies will allow to be sold; indeed if anyone knows of any fares it doesn't sell, please do let me know and I will pass the request on.

 

[arb]

Interesting. I've never encountered this before, except for tickets that are obviously a special offer from one specific TOC being limited to their own website.

 

[ForTheLoveOf]

I suspect it's an issue regarding the ticket code (SO2) being a non-standard code (i.e. not CDR, SDR etc.). Different booking engines handle this in different ways - some will simply not display tickets with a type code they don't recognise, which perhaps makes sense seeing as there are a lot of "garbage" fares in the data (e.g. £999 notional fares for groups).

The better ones will try and offer all ticket types. TrainSplit is one example of this. It would appear that GA and XC have manually updated their booking engines to offer the fare.