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Trainsplit - Avanti tickets no seat selector

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trainophile

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Trying to book some Avanti Advance tickets for early December, it's giving me seat reservation but no means of changing the allocated seats.

Yesterday the seat selector was running but some coaches were not showing - it started from C which was showing nothing available, and missed out A and B completely. It also included some 1st Class coaches when I'd selected Standard Class tickets.

I messaged our Trainsplit contact (not the one who has recently hung up his Trainsplit hat) but today's development looks like a new can of worms. Not sure if my message yesterday has been received as not had a reply.

Trainsplit is often promoted on here for one of the advantages being the seat selector. Is the lack of seat selector Avanti's "fault" or is there a problem with Trainsplit?
 
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trainophile

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From the other thread:

Thank you. Is that the thread that I presumed was about the seat selector on Avanti's own website? I don't use that one as I don't like the interface. I didn't realise it was relevant to Trainsplit as well. What a shame it's gone down, it was most useful.
 

Adam Williams

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Just to clarify, the SeatSelector isn't down and is still available to use for single-passenger bookings.

Our supplier doesn't allow us to change seats for more than 1 passenger due to challenges that arose after social distancing logic was put in place upstream. It is appreciated that this situation is less than ideal.
 

trainophile

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So theoretically you could make two separate bookings, each for one person, and change the allocated seat/s individually so you can sit together?
 

yorkie

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So theoretically you could make two separate bookings, each for one person, and change the allocated seat/s individually so you can sit together?
Yes, but I wouldn't do it as two separate bookings. Just do it as two separate journeys within the same booking.
 

Adam Williams

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Depending on whether the social distancing logic is still there or not, you might find it doesn't let you put the second journey next to the first seat you've picked (i.e. the surrounding seats get put out of use) on the same service.

You'd expect all of this to have gone following the relaxation of the government regulations, but that hasn't stopped some TOCs persisting with the mandatory reservations flag in the timetable data, so I don't want to speculate either way.
 

AM9

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Depending on whether the social distancing logic is still there or not, you might find it doesn't let you put the second journey next to the first seat you've picked (i.e. the surrounding seats get put out of use) on the same service.

You'd expect all of this to have gone following the relaxation of the government regulations, but that hasn't stopped some TOCs persisting with the mandatory reservations flag in the timetable data, so I don't want to speculate either way.
Maybe that's why I had so many problems trying to get seats that matched my preference: I made the mistake of trying to book two tickets on a Two Together Card. :)
 

181

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Our supplier doesn't allow us to change seats for more than 1 passenger due to challenges that arose after social distancing logic was put in place upstream. It is appreciated that this situation is less than ideal.
That would presumably explain why I couldn't change seats when booking a journey for my parents on LNER the other day.

I found another anomaly when using Trainsplit later the same day to make a booking for myself on LNER. I could get into the seat selector, but the list of coaches down the left-hand side indicated that coach H, into which I'd been put, was first class, and didn't bear much relationship to the Azuma seating plans on the LNER website; it can't have thought the train was a Mk4 set as it included some composite coaches (good to see that old-fashioned-seeming railway term still in use, by the way), which I don't think the Mk4 sets have. When I tried to move to a seat in an undoubtedly standard class coach I got an error message.

As it appears that coach H is standard class on all LNER trains, I presume that my seat had been allocated correctly, and it's just the seating plans being presented to me that were wrong. However, as there weren't any splits available for my journey I eventually booked directly with LNER.
 

SickyNicky

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@Adam Williams , is it possible to book Avanti Standard Premium tickets on trainsplit?
This is actually a little more difficult that it seems at first sight. That's because there's no flag in the data to distinguish them, so they look like normal standard class tickets, and thus are rarely the cheapest option. And TrainSplit is set up to only offer the cheapest options, rather than the full range of tickets.

It would be quite a challenge to split them - probably they only way at the moment would be to parse the ticket name, but that's fraught with danger.
 

tornado

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They seem to be always exactly +£30 of the current advance single price for GLA-EUS. Could it be possible to make a table of all the supplement amounts for different stations, and then if the pair of (£xx and £xx+suppl) exists for a given journey you know that the 2nd ticket is the standard premium.
 

SickyNicky

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One way to do it would be to create a white list of "Standard Premium" fares and feed that into the FastJP journey planner. It's a bit of a hack though.
 
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