Site to compare availability of advances over a month

[mrmartin]

Is there a site that shows availability of advance tickets for a certain time period over a month say?

What I'm looking for is long distance singles into London in the AM peak. I can choose which days I'm in London, but need to get in before 10. Right now I've been doing flexible split tickets which is a big saving on the anytime price but is still pretty pricey (and also results in 10 seperate tickets which is a bit of a pain).

Obviously GWR etc have cheapest fare finder, but I need to constrain it to trains which get in before 10.

 

[Adam Williams]

The industry's reservation system makes this sort of functionality nearly impossible to offer properly, due to both technical and contractual limitations.

The passenger loses out as well as HMT when price-sensitive consumers decide not to travel by rail due poor visibility of under-utilised services, which might have a more tolerable ticket price point.

 

[mrmartin]

I actually just wrote a quick script to scrape NRE to get this since I couldn't find it anywhere.

What's interesting is GWR at least on my route doesn't seem to actually be doing any quota per 'train'.

I've attached output here.

It seems they are just setting the advances for tues-thurs as all the same price per week, with mon and friday having a quota and thus different prices for each train?

 

[Adam Williams]

Could well be one of the strategies they're using... I think there were some industry/govt efforts to try and encourage more patronage on Mondays/Fridays.

Depending on the TOC which you investigate, you'll see some interesting strategies around inventory management. Some of them have very complex, fully-automated ways of tweaking availability buckets to optimise for revenue based on perceived and actual demand. Indeed, the train operators have invested a lot of money into technical improvements which help them do this in more convoluted ways.

 

[mrmartin]

Doesn't look like GWR is doing anything clever at all, an intern could put together this strategy! I think you could probably get away with charging more for ones that get in before 8.30 vs 9.30 for example.