How many people actually buy off of Trainsplit and how many just take their suggestions and go and buy it via their own favourite retailer - saying them another few quid in the process?
Notwithstanding taxpayer funded cashback and stuff like perks, in terms of the actual ticket price, there is no actual saving to book elsewhere.
If you put the same tickets into your basket on our site, it would be the same price as the TOCs. I am not sure how anyone could possibly measure how many people engage in this underhand practice, though?!
I know at some ticket offices people want a ticket to X, a price is given, and then say it was cheaper on Trainline at y, because of a split but not explicitly referenced are requested, is it then permitted to sell the split without being in breach of impartial retailing rules?
Only if the customer
specifically requests it.
Otherwise, this is considered to be "distorting the market"; employers may take a very dim view of this, and indeed LNER issued a reminder recently about this.
If a customer asks for a ticket from Newcastle to London on a Saturday, which allows full flexibility, a ticket office should charge £192.80 each way, with no mention of cheaper splits. If the customer doesn't want to pay that, then they should simply be lost as a customer, and not told of any cheaper options.
We can offer splits automatically, even though LNER don't want us to, but ticket office staff are specifically told they must not do this!
I'm looking at a journey from Newcastle to Birmingham on Friday, departing at 1035. The site is offering me an Advance for £65.78 with splits at Darlington, York & Derby.
The flexible options for trains near then (0940, 1035, 1040 & 1140) are all priced slightly differently - I guess because of slightly different stopping patterns, and different splits.
So if I wanted the max flexibility, do I need to choose the most expensive flexible split - £90.44?
Select flexible split, go to the next page and providing it's splitting at
any of Darlington, York, Sheffield and Derby, and nowhere else, you effectively have full flexibility.
And if I bought the Advance split, but needed to change to a different service, would I just pay £10 + (£90.44-£65.78).
That's right; we only charge £10 for the whole journey to be changed, however retailers such as LNER, Trainline etc typically charge £10
per ticket. This was documented in the following thread:
Hello everyone! So my parents and I are going up to London on Monday the 18th and returning on Wednesday the 20th. Now as I was booking the tickets they booked the cheapest, of course, but didn't see that they were advance tickets. Now the inbound is okay, but the outbound has now become a...
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