Unobtainable Tickets

[aelius]

The National Rail site identified a very good advanced ticket from London to Hastings. It directed me to Southern to buy it. The ticket wasn't offered on that site at that price. Indeed the actual train (changing at Brighton) was not even shown as an option.

I tried East Coast where I normally book. Not there.

Finally I tried Virgin and was able to purchase it.

It's happened previously with Manchester to Kendal. Got a very good first class ticket on the Virgin site that wasn't sold on the Transpennine express site even though the whole journey was on Transpennine.

What's going on?

Do I need to look at more than one site to get the best deal?

 

[bb21]

The default routeing setting can be different on different booking engines, so sometimes they give different itineraries. The ticket is there, just that they are not always shown depending on what itinerary you were given.

Southern and East Coast both use WebTIS, so they should give you the same itinerary. Virgin uses thetrainline, so may have a different setting.

 

[34D]

It could be that the last available ticket was snapped up as you were trying?

 

[kieron]

The National Rail site identified a very good advanced ticket from London to Hastings. It directed me to Southern to buy it. The ticket wasn't offered on that site at that price. Indeed the actual train (changing at Brighton) was not even shown as an option.

There are two main possibilities. The engine Southern use may not think that the route National Rail gave you is valid. Or it may have chosen not to show it based on the "quickest route" rules it uses.

To find out which it is, you can compare the details of the routes Southern give, and the route of the train you found on National Rail. If the National Rail route went via Brighton, but none of the ones on Southern did, you can select to only show routes via Brighton on the Southern web site. All of the booking sites I've seen have this setting, but you usually have to select "more options" or "advanced options" or something like that first.

If it still doesn't show the train if you do this, it probably thinks it isn't a valid route, in which case you'll just need to use a different web site.

 

[yorkie]

The National Rail site identified a very good advanced ticket from London to Hastings. It directed me to Southern to buy it. The ticket wasn't offered on that site at that price. Indeed the actual train (changing at Brighton) was not even shown as an option.

So it wasn't offering the same itinerary.

Did you specify "via Brighton" and/or select 'Southern only' from the route options to try to find it?

Finally I tried Virgin and was able to purchase it.

Virgin's site is powered by Thetrainline, which uses different algorithms to the other sites you tried, both powered by Atos WebTIS.

It's happened previously with Manchester to Kendal. Got a very good first class ticket on the Virgin site that wasn't sold on the Transpennine express site even though the whole journey was on Transpennine.

They are both powered by Thetrainline but may have different settings specified, which means they might find different itineraries.

If the itinerary was identical, someone might have briefly put a ticket in their basket that was the last available in the quota, this can cause the price to appear to fluctuate.

 

[hangus78]

They are both powered by Thetrainline but may have different settings specified, which means they might find different itineraries.

That Depends how far back 'previously' is. TPE is now also on the WebTIS engine.