"Reservations recommended" on Avanti's site

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Avanti West Coast's website seems to have now added an extra facet of confusion to the debacle of compulsory reservations, by showing services which are marked as compulsory reservation (on all operators - which will surely cause an issue in the future if an operator tries to mark a service as compulsory reservation and actually means that) as "seat reservations recommended" rather than required. For what it's worth, the website doesn't actually give you the option not to reserve a seat if you pick such a service, so it doesn't even agree with itself.

This shows that Avanti don't actually have a blanket compulsory reservation policy. So why on earth would they change their website so that it relays the timetable data incorrectly, rather than changing the timetable data to reflect what the actual policy is in reality?

 

[mmh]

Which services are still marked as reservations compulsory? There shouldn't be any, surely?

Reservations recommended has existed for decades, perhaps they're just displaying this on their online booking system?

 

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Which services are still marked as reservations compulsory? There shouldn't be any, surely?

Reservations recommended has existed for decades, perhaps they're just displaying this on their online booking system?

Nope. Avanti and LNER services appear on Avanti's booking system as "recommended" but on others as mandatory.

Try looking up Manchester to Euston with Avanti and with c2c (who I believe use the same underlying booking software), for example - you'll get different information about the same service.