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LNER and TPE - Through Advances not available while Advances for individual legs of the journey are

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Silver Cobra

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I'm currently scouting out a potential day trip for myself and my mum to visit Scarborough during the summer, which would involve travelling on Thameslink from Arlesey to Peterborough, LNER to York and TPE to Scarborough. The dates I'm looking to travel, which is either July 13th or July 20th, have advance fares available for both the Thameslink/LNER leg from Arlesey to York and the TPE leg from York to Scarborough. However, when searching for through advances from Arlesey to Scarborough, it returns no fares other than Off-Peak/Anytime returns. To see if the Thameslink portion of the journey could be causing issues, I changed the search to just Peterborough to Scarborough, but again still no through advances. In fact, checking almost any date from around mid-May through to 23rd July (the last date TPE advances are available to), there are no through advances available from Peterborough to Scarborough, despite advances being available for each separate leg (PBO to YRK and YRK to SCA).

Would anyone be able to provide some insight into this? Having to buy the two legs separately bumps up the potential cost of the journey a fair bit, so I'm hoping that through advances do eventually become available.
 
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Watershed

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I'm currently scouting out a potential day trip for myself and my mum to visit Scarborough during the summer, which would involve travelling on Thameslink from Arlesey to Peterborough, LNER to York and TPE to Scarborough. The dates I'm looking to travel, which is either July 13th or July 20th, have advance fares available for both the Thameslink/LNER leg from Arlesey to York and the TPE leg from York to Scarborough. However, when searching for through advances from Arlesey to Scarborough, it returns no fares other than Off-Peak/Anytime returns. To see if the Thameslink portion of the journey could be causing issues, I changed the search to just Peterborough to Scarborough, but again still no through advances. In fact, checking almost any date from around mid-May through to 23rd July (the last date TPE advances are available to), there are no through advances available from Peterborough to Scarborough, despite advances being available for each separate leg (PBO to YRK and YRK to SCA).

Would anyone be able to provide some insight into this? Having to buy the two legs separately bumps up the potential cost of the journey a fair bit, so I'm hoping that through advances do eventually become available.
There are no guarantees of getting through Advances at all. Looking at the same journey nearer to today, I can't find any itineraries where through Advances are offered if going via York.

You'll probably need to travel via Hull and Bridlington to get through Advances. Try Trainsplit to see what suggestions it comes up with but bear in mind that Northern may not have released Advance tickets yet, and splitting at Doncaster may be worthwhile.
 

Bletchleyite

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There are no guarantees of getting through Advances at all. Looking at the same journey nearer to today, I can't find any itineraries where through Advances are offered if going via York.

You'll probably need to travel via Hull and Bridlington to get through Advances. Try Trainsplit to see what suggestions it comes up with but bear in mind that Northern may not have released Advance tickets yet, and splitting at Doncaster may be worthwhile.

Through Advance fares do exist if you check BRFares. Which is odd. Is this a quirk of which quotas are being used?
 

Watershed

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Through Advance fares do exist if you check BRFares. Which is odd. Is this a quirk of which quotas are being used?
They are defined, but that doesn't mean they will be available for purchase at all, or for the fastest itinerary (which is usually via York in this case). Cross-TOC Advance availability is often limited or non-existent.
 

adrock1976

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To save me starting a new thread as I will be travelling to Filey on Monday, I had to split the tickets into Croy - York, York - Scarborough, and Scarborough - Filey as I could not get any through Advances.

I did try - Croy - Scarborough, Croy - Seamer, and Croy - Malton, but only the flexible fares were shown.

More concerning is that on Friday 7 May, I am booked on the 11:24 Filey - Scarborough (to connect with the train to York and onwards to Croy) which seemingly does not exist. I have looked at the Table 43 PDF (Scarborough - Hull), but checking on the Northern website (as they have numbered tables) I cannot get it to bring up Table 43 for the revised times.
 

voyagerdude220

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Strangely I can see Advance fares available between Arlesey and York, but like the OP says, not all the way to Scarborough.

On a similar theme, I've noticed recently that Avanti appear to have removed almost all advance fares between Preston and Crewe and v.v.- even on trains where advance fares are available to the next stop after Crewe- be it Preston to Wolverhampton or London Euston etc.
 

alistairlees

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It looks like TPE have not set up any quotas for LNER Advance fares on trains operating between York and Scarborough at all. This could be either a mistake (TOCs often forget to add availability for the Advance fares of other TOCs that are valid on their services), or deliberate.
 

Ianno87

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I've noticed this for journeys like Cambridge-Stevenage-Doncaster/Leeds-Manchester. Decent Advances available individually, but a through Advance non-existent.

This is where retail sites should really be showing the through fare split, as passengers must be put off by the "artificial" High price.
 

Kite159

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I've noticed this for journeys like Cambridge-Stevenage-Doncaster/Leeds-Manchester. Decent Advances available individually, but a through Advance non-existent.

This is where retail sites should really be showing the through fare split, as passengers must be put off by the "artificial" High price.

I guess this is where the likes of TrainSplit comes into it's own being able to pick out the split points where advance tickets are available for B to C but not "A to B then onto C".
 

Bletchleyite

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I've noticed this for journeys like Cambridge-Stevenage-Doncaster/Leeds-Manchester. Decent Advances available individually, but a through Advance non-existent.

This is where retail sites should really be showing the through fare split, as passengers must be put off by the "artificial" High price.

That was I think one of the DfT's proposals to remove anomalies - Advances would just be priced per leg and summed together onto one ticket so you could always get one.
 

Silver Cobra

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There are no guarantees of getting through Advances at all. Looking at the same journey nearer to today, I can't find any itineraries where through Advances are offered if going via York.

You'll probably need to travel via Hull and Bridlington to get through Advances. Try Trainsplit to see what suggestions it comes up with but bear in mind that Northern may not have released Advance tickets yet, and splitting at Doncaster may be worthwhile.

They are defined, but that doesn't mean they will be available for purchase at all, or for the fastest itinerary (which is usually via York in this case). Cross-TOC Advance availability is often limited or non-existent.

That's understandable. Seems I forget that, just because the fare is defined in the system, it doesn't mean it has to be offered. I've done this journey in the past (July 2017 and August 2019) using through advances from Arlesey to Scarborough via York, which is why I was hoping they would be available now. I guess there is still the possibility that through advances do eventually become available, such as after the May timetable change (the LNER website says that TPE's train times from 16th May onwards are still subject to change, which could be why TPE offer advances just for their services but not for through connections with LNER), so I'll wait it out for now and see what happens.

While travelling via Doncaster and Hull does open up a possible cheaper alternative in the advent that through advances do not become available via York, as this extends the journey time each way by nearly an hour, I'd probably just pay the extra to travel via York on split tickets.
 

robbeech

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Whilst this isn’t necessarily caused by a quota issue it could very quickly turn into one as time passes and tickets get sold.

for whatever reason, through advances aren’t released and don’t appear to have been released for some time. This may be LNER not releasing them or it may be TPE not releasing them.

Whilst ever there are individual leg advances available to buy, the quota for these will be being used up individually so the cheaper tiers will disappear. This means if they DID release through advances nearer to the fare of travel it is likely that they would be at a higher price than the current sum of its parts.
 

robbeech

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LNER advances are avilable unyil 3rd September currently.
Indeed they’ve quite recently got back to something closer to ‘normal’ which is great news.
the issue is the through advances, even Scarborough London Terminals have no through advances. Should we assume this is TPE not releasing quota for ‘and connections’ tickets then?
 

Wallsendmag

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Indeed they’ve quite recently got back to something closer to ‘normal’ which is great news.
the issue is the through advances, even Scarborough London Terminals have no through advances. Should we assume this is TPE not releasing quota for ‘and connections’ tickets then?
Could well be.
 

Haywain

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Indeed they’ve quite recently got back to something closer to ‘normal’ which is great news.
the issue is the through advances, even Scarborough London Terminals have no through advances. Should we assume this is TPE not releasing quota for ‘and connections’ tickets then?
LNER has no control over availability of quotas on TPE services.
 

paul1609

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Its been like that for journeys from South of London to the north for some years now. Every so often you will still get one but I'd guess its something like 1 in 5 journeys now.
Its worth checking for independent advances anyway they are often much cheaper than the through advances.
 
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