I'm looking to travel to Haverfordwest next week. I'm hoping to camp on the Gower Peninsula on the way back so I need a flexible ticket that allows me to break my return journey at Swansea. However, I've just looked at Trainline and found all the standard trains on Monday are full. I looked at Tuesday instead and tickets are available. However, I want to use the vouchers I got from Transport for Wales for the same journey I made last Christmas that was disrupted because the driver assaulted - they refunded my entire ticket from Beeston to Haverfordwest. It seems I need to reserve the Cross country section of the journey, and the only way I can do that is by buying a ticket from the Cross Country website - i.e. not using my vouchers. Any ideas?
XC have changed their timetable data so that online booking systems require a reservation in order for a ticket to be sold in conjunction with an itinerary on any XC service. They have then limited the number of available reservations to far below the actual socially distanced capacity of their services. As a result many XC services are now showing as "sold out", even though in reality there will still be many socially distanced seats empty on the day - and there are no reports of anyone denied travel on their services due to lacking a reservation.
You can circumvent the requirement to obtain a reservation to buy a ticket, by obtaining your ticket at a booking office or TVM (note, a few TOCs' TVMs now go off itineraries so would have the same issues as booking online, but certainly none of EMR's TVMs). Of course you'll need to visit a ticket office anyway if you are to buy your tickets before travelling using your RTVs. Note that you are permitted to buy on board if there is no open ticket office and you intend to use RTVs.
If you do buy your ticket at the ticket office, you will find that they will have the same difficulties getting you a reservation as you would have online, because they are accessing exactly the same reservation database. So in fact I would suggest
not asking them for a reservation with your tickets, because they might refuse to sell you a ticket if they see that reservations are "mandatory" but they can't get you any.
Obtaining a reservation is never a bad idea but I certainly wouldn't be delaying your journey or inconveniencing yourself just to play along with XC's games.
In terms of fares, tickets to Haverfordwest cost the same as to all the other nearby West Wales stations. So you may as well get your ticket issued to Milford Haven (for the same price) in case you end up needing to use the train to/from there. Note that most tickets are interavailable between the Milford Haven, Pembroke and Fishguard lines, so a ticket to Milford Haven would actually be valid along any of those three lines (due to the low service frequency).
Break of journey is permitted on both portions of a ticket from Beeston to Haverfordwest, so you're perfectly OK to make your journey at Swansea on the way back. I can't see that it's any cheaper to split tickets when doing a period return journey so I would just go with a simple through ticket in this instance.