Is the Two Together discount lower than 34% for combined train+bus tickets?

[arb]

I'm playing around with fares from Cambridge to various places in Cornwall. I've not really got any specific dates or places in mind, just seeing what potential travel costs to various places might be. For the purposes of this thread, I'm only looking at off-peak returns, not advances. I'm using GWR's booking engine, but have verified the prices I quote below with National Rail Enquiries as well.

For tickets from Cambridge to "Padstow By Bus", the standard adult fare is £129. So that's £258 for two adults, but with a two together railcard, I'm offered a discounted fare of £223.50, which is only a 14% discount (approximately), and not the 34% I'd expect.

By comparison, Cambridge to Bodmin Parkway (the station from which the "bus" element of the Padstow ticket would begin) is £123, or £246 for two people, and the two together discounted fare is £162.40, a discount of exactly 34%.

I also see the same discrepancy between the discounts for those two destinations if I search with London as the origin, rather than Cambridge, so this appears to be related to the "Padstow by bus" destination. Does the two together discount not apply in full for mixed-mode tickets? I can't see anything to suggest that on the two together railcard website. It does talk about the discount only applying to "rail fares", but if you interpreted that literally then I'd expect to see no discount at all on the Padstow ticket, rather than the seemingly random 14%.

 

[Paul Kelly]

Yes, there is very often not a railcard discount on the non-rail "add-on" portion of such fares. But that is not the issue here - the problem is the undiscounted price of £129 is the Super Off-Peak Return, but the discounted price you're referring to is for the more expensive Off-Peak Return. The Super Off-Peak Return does not appear to be valid in combination with the Two Together Railcard. This would appear to be an error on GWR's part.

 

[hexagon789]

I'm playing around with fares from Cambridge to various places in Cornwall. I've not really got any specific dates or places in mind, just seeing what potential travel costs to various places might be. For the purposes of this thread, I'm only looking at off-peak returns, not advances. I'm using GWR's booking engine, but have verified the prices I quote below with National Rail Enquiries as well.

For tickets from Cambridge to "Padstow By Bus", the standard adult fare is £129. So that's £258 for two adults, but with a two together railcard, I'm offered a discounted fare of £223.50, which is only a 14% discount (approximately), and not the 34% I'd expect.

By comparison, Cambridge to Bodmin Parkway (the station from which the "bus" element of the Padstow ticket would begin) is £123, or £246 for two people, and the two together discounted fare is £162.40, a discount of exactly 34%.

I also see the same discrepancy between the discounts for those two destinations if I search with London as the origin, rather than Cambridge, so this appears to be related to the "Padstow by bus" destination. Does the two together discount not apply in full for mixed-mode tickets? I can't see anything to suggest that on the two together railcard website. It does talk about the discount only applying to "rail fares", but if you interpreted that literally then I'd expect to see no discount at all on the Padstow ticket, rather than the seemingly random 14%.

The discount generally only applies to the rail portion. Though that doesn't seem to explain the odd 14% figure.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

... The Super Off-Peak Return does not appear to be valid in combination with the Two Together Railcard. This would appear to be an error on GWR's part.

Is there any reliable way of reporting fare, timetable and booking engine errors, with some hope that it gets fixed?

At an rail-operations level, the rail industry takes near-misses very seriously, and its injury history pays testament to this. But at a Customer Service level, the culture seems completely different - roadblocks erected to discourage reporting of errors (eg month-plus response time to emails), and when one does manage to get a TOC to register that something went wrong, the instinct seems always to brush it off as a one-off, or simply seek to fix the symptom on a one-off basis.

I tried to tell GWR about an fares error and got a reply that assumed that I was an incompetent user. Kept responding, never got a sensible response and eventually gave up. A similar experience trying to report a serious timetable error (eventually wrote to my MP who got it sorted - he was Transport Secretary at the time). I've tried but failed to get anyone bothered about a systematic problem on the booking engine used by Trainline, among others - where passengers can end up specifying one station end up with tickets and itineraries for another where there are multiple stations with the same first word (eg specify Matlock, get Matlock Bath).

That culture even seems to extend to the watchdog: Transport Focus boast of getting a refund for a passenger who was fined on T&W Metro for no ticket, despite three attempts at using a machine, and videoing the problem. TF seemed to feel that getting him the refund was job-done: no question of why staff didn't know the machine had failed, why staff refused to consider his evidence and still issued a fine, or why T&W Metro refused his appeal despite the evidence.

 

[Joe Paxton]

Is there any reliable way of reporting fare, timetable and booking engine errors, with some hope that it gets fixed?
...

To an extent, posting about it on here might work for some issues!