Multiple advance ticket options to choose from

[Leogilbert007]

Moderator note: Split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...booking-your-rail-tickets.236796/post-7285219

When booking certain journeys I’m offered two ‘types’ of ticket, but it’s unclear how they differ. Making a ‘dummy’ purchase between Victoria and Chatham, I am offered both an ‘Advance Single’ at £6.25, AND an ‘Advance’ that is much pricier at 10.55. I was able to reproduce this on multiple flows, mostly (but not only) on the Chatham Mainline.

I’m really confused; I thought there was only one type of advance single. Is this a fares anomaly or something on Raileasy’s side?

 

[MrJeeves]

Advance fares are set up as many separate tickets within the fares information which railway ticketing retailers use. In this case, under ticket code "SEE" for the £6.25 one, and "L10" for the £10.55 one. Retailers have to use their own logic to prevent every single available tier of advance appearing as available for purchase, though.

To make sure people get any option they want for a given journey, the ticket deduplication logic I wrote for the Android app shows the cheapest available advance ticket type which has a unique (a) ticket name, (b) ticket route, (c) ticket origin, or (d) ticket destination. In this case, the route, origin, destination are all the same, but the name is different which is why it would show in this case. I believe iOS uses the same logic for deduplicating tickets as the Android app does, which would also explain why it shows on there too.

The reason it was done like this is so that you can choose a ticket from London Underground Zone 1 to Chatham, for example, and the fact that there is a ticket from London Terminals does not prevent the ticket being shown even though that would be cheaper. Similarly, the check against ticket name is also required to prevent the apps from hiding Standard Premium advances on Avanti; these are technically Standard class tickets in the fares information, so not including a check for the ticket name would mean that SP advances wouldn't show as they're always(?) more expensive than just Standard class advances.

 

[Leogilbert007]

Alright @MrJeeves , thanks for such detailed information. The more you know…