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GWR fare increases
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We're seeing more mid-year changes to unregulated fares now, all part of the plan to extract more money from passengers. Also avoids the negative publicity of the annual fare rise, because no one is aware.
Southern Advances have gone up too.
Southern Advances have gone up too.
One Day Travelcard
Now reaching a ~30% increase in less than 3 years for an off peak ODT from Didcot. Meanwhile, the service is at least as unreliable as ever if not worse. Daylight robbery comes to mind.
As for the cretins on Reddit etc, their stupidity is hard to comprehend, although I'm not personally familiar with the fares in question. Not the first time this has happened, including from careless giveaways posted around here. The railway may not be able to provide an acceptable service at bearable cost but some of its employees do appear to spend their time trawling the Internet to see if anyone else has spotted their mistakes for them. How anyone is thick enough to not anticipate this remains an open question.
Where from?
Three main opportunities, the latest on 18 May, the next in September, and the main one in March.
I thought it was Off Peak Day Travelcard, although perhaps it in fact makes no difference at all!
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Would it be possible to provide us with a link to the reddit discussion, or at least give us a clue which sub it's on? Thank you.
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It looks like this is the second year in a row where GWR have seen fit to impose a second mid-year increase to their Off-Peak Thames Valley fares.
As others have said, there can be absolutely no justification for this given that the normal annual increase has already been set as 1 percentage point above RPI (which itself exceeds true inflation). Indeed GWR have been silent about it, probably hoping it would slip through unnoticed.
As others have said, there can be absolutely no justification for this given that the normal annual increase has already been set as 1 percentage point above RPI (which itself exceeds true inflation). Indeed GWR have been silent about it, probably hoping it would slip through unnoticed.
Yes. I think they increased at all three rounds last year.
Presumably the cost of the IET contract, and a captive market, is forcing fares upward. Is there also a "Saturday morning problem" with these flows?
It seems an experiment to change the structure of the fare levels in real terms, while avoiding large one-off fare increases.
Given the money is all going to Treasury and not some "evil private company", what is your interpretation of what is going on here? Do Treasury / DfT civil servants have a "hot list" of places where they think fares need to be higher?
It's certainly not gone unnoticed here...
The oldest ODT from Didcot I could quickly lay my hands on is from Dec 2015 - £19.40 with Network Railcard.
Today it's £29.80, that's 54% inflation. Cumulative CPI over the same period is 38% according to the Bank of England.
So the price hike is 42% above the general rate of inflation.
(Yes, I know the govt uses RPI to set rail fares, because reasons - presumably the railway has a mortgage on a buy-to-let empire it's sitting on plus a collection of yachts. Then it adds a fun +1% just to spread the joy. Back in the real world the CPI more accurately reflects what relevant everyday mundane stuff costs).
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They'll be thinking we need more revenue - try charging more. The DfT seem to be on a mission to maximise revenue and test what price the market will bear. Areas like the Thames Valley will be targeted because it has a strong commuter market and a leisure culture closely linked to London - what's the alternative to the train if you want to go to (central) London? Fares will (unfortunately) be inelastic.
It's a living lab. Try changing some things, see what happens, does it make more money? If it doesn't bring in more money, reverse it - or knowing the DfT announce "new Didcot to London Advance fares".
I think that's giving them far, far more credit on the details than they deserve. A casual reader of this forum (or reddit?) will probably have a significantly stronger grasp over the nuances of where tickets are good value than anyone at the department (except maybe the people who are in both parts of that particular Venn diagram).
It's easier to be prescriptive about costs than it is about revenues, because with costs you can simply dictate the budget and threaten to apply penalties if overspend is outside of the tolerance. You can't really use a stick for revenue being below target, you have to have some kind of evidence behind it like a consistently poor ticketless travel result.
If I had to guess, mine would be that increased media coverage and greater range of outlets offering automatic splits (e.g. Trainline app, ScotRail, WMR and LNR websites) which started a few years ago of the split ticket opportunities of using the long-haul trains that call at Didcot Parkway makes that station an especially easy one to win at. Some people who are more plugged in will also have a Network Railcard and arrange a split manually at a station where they know they'll be able to get the discount.
Similar cost pressures and high demand exist at other operators, yet they are not increasing fares by the same amount.
I wonder whether this is a GWR initiative or whether the DfT are involved?
No idea, but that doesn't justify an all-week fare increase. If there is a Saturday morning problem then on a railway run in the public interest, this would be addressed by adding capacity - it's not like GWR are short of 387s - rather than increasing fares.
Perhaps so, and very sneaky at that.
I doubt they understand the markets well enough to do that. More plausible that they asked franchise/contract holders in general to come forward with proposals for increasing revenue or reducing subsidy by X% each year, and this is how GWR have met that.
That would only necessitate a higher-than-usual increase for Didcot fares. What's happened here is far wider than that - indeed it's affected a lot of journeys that are unlikely to even involve travelling with GWR (e.g. travel between 'local' stations on the GWML east of Reading, like Hayes & Harlington to Slough).
In a few years CPI(H) will be the only option. RPI should have been retired several years ago, but at last that particular injustice is being corrected. And I say that as someone who owns some assets which benefit (albeit a tiny amount) in value from the differential.
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It probably wouldn't make an enormous amount of sense to raise Newbury and Didcot Parkway, and any other relevant Network Railcard boundary stations, and not apply it to a wider area. All you'd do is move the split points, or open up novel rebooking anomalies for people who actually do use Didcot Parkway.
Having delved deeper into some of the changes this evening, it’s even more worrying than just the ticket price rises. GWR have also removed some off-peak local fares completely, e.g. Slough to Maidenhead, which now only has the (higher) Anytime fare. This includes their contactless rate submission to TfL, whose site now shows no off-peak fare at all and thus represents an even higher price increase. If this is a trial, it’s a very slippery slope.
Interesting! To confirm Slough to Maidenhead only has no off peak fares, only a fare of £2.80 available at any time.
@MikeWh has this been seen anywhere else before? Outside of fares to Heathrow I can't think of a case, and even at Heathrow there's technically peak and off peak fares (at the same price) so that railcard holders applied to Oyster cards can benefit from the railcard discount at off peak times.
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miklcct
On Moderation
Isn't the fare regulated?
The off-peak fare won't be, but many of the off-peak fares on the corridor are already only 10p cheaper than the anytime fares, or in the case of Slough to Maidenhead, the same.
This is an example of that phenomenon of people complaining about there not being a discount for travelling off-peak, once the anytime fare is the only fare available. Is £2.80 each way for Slough to Maidenhead too high, too low, or about right in comparative terms?
Haywain
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 3 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 20,502
I'd say that for a journey of almost 6 miles it's quite reasonable.
Yes. Until a couple of years ago there was only a daily fare between any two zone 1 Underground stations. The GatEx fare is the same. When railcards come to contactless I'm sure there will be an off-peak option for them, but at the moment it's just undiscounted fares. Slough to Burnham is only 10p difference so I'm guessing they've applied a formula and in the case of Slough to Maidenhead the rounding made both fares the same.
Edit: Other intermediate fares are more than 10p difference so it won't be that. Perhaps it's the existance of fast GWR services? In any case, GWR would be the ones to ask as they set the fares.
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unsatisfied
Member
Is there anything stopping GWR from axing all unregulated fares and charging the most they can? Are we powerless in our struggle against rail monopolies?
In practical terms they would be well aware of the backlash if they did this wholesale across all routes. More to the point, for longer journeys where the regulated fare is the (Super) Off-Peak Return, they are not about to abolish Anytime fares...
But yes, in theory the only constraints are the obligations imposed on them by their contract with the government - which, as far as I'm aware, leave them with some degree of discretion on these matters.
unsatisfied
Member
I'm sure they can deal with a little backlash if it makes them more money. Passengers should vote with their feet and use another train service! Oh wait...
To your second point I'm trying to find journeys where the Super Off-Peak Return is regulated and the Anytime Return is not, however I'm struggling to get even one Super Off-Peak Return from this dataset show on the fare finder. Perhaps you know a working example?
Any money they make is passed straight to the government. There would be some quite significant implications if they were to abolish all unregulated Off-Peak fares; they (and the government) will be well aware of this from the LNER sham trial.
Almost any GWR-set Super Off-Peak Return will be regulated, at least indirectly. The list of regulated flows technically only covers more major origin-destination pairs, but since long-distance fares are set on a 'cluster' basis (from "stations in the Cardiff area" to London Terminals, for example) this results in indirect regulation of the lesser used station pairs.
Coming to your specific question, the list of regulated flows in that FoI request is quite few years out of date now, and doesn't reflect the removal of most return fares by LNER. Effectively it is the Super Off-Peak Single that has become the regulated fare there, though the extent to which a fare can be considered 'regulated' nowadays is debatable.
unsatisfied
Member
Why is that? I thought private operators make money from higher ticket prices?
Franchises were replaced by management contracts when Covid hit. Under these, the general arrangement is that operators pass all revenue to the government and are reimbursed their costs plus an agreed profit margin.
The precise details vary depending on the operator and contract, but there are usually mechanisms to provide bonuses for meeting targets. It's not impossible to believe those could include revenue targets, but since the whole point of these arrangements is to take the revenue risk away from the operator, it's more likely to focus on things like revenue protection targets (e.g. ticketless travel percentages) than absolute revenue.
The only operators that operate truly commercially are the open access operators, i.e. Eurostar, Heathrow Express, Lumo, Hull Trains and Grand Central.
Kite159
Veteran Member
Which makes sense in a way, getting rid of off-peak fares when they only offer a tiny (10p) saving over the anytime fare. Making things 'simpler' by doing away with confusing terms such as off-peak, although hopefully it's only on those flows where the two prices are nearly the same.