But, but, Virgin are rolling out 65 new trains.........
-
Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Virgin / Stagecoach win East Coast
- Thread starter Suraggu
- Start date
- Status
But, but, Virgin are rolling out 65 new trains.........
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
ModernRailways
Established Member
- Joined
- 21 Apr 2011
- Messages
- 2,180
My only problem is that I can't see any benefits, only losses.
It would be nice if we could see what the other bidding companies were planning on doing and then comparing it with what Virgin are offering. DOR didn't really do much when you think about it, they just made the service more inviting, the rewards system, first class offering and just general marketing. What did DOR do, that they weren't just following on from NatEx?
transmanche
Established Member
- Joined
- 27 Feb 2011
- Messages
- 6,021
The Eureka timetable?
Didn't that start under NatEx? They just finished off the planning and implementation?
All good examples of incoming operators getting the glory of things already happening. They all do it. (And why wouldn't they?)
Those new Thameslink trains will be seen as a Govia investment by many, and who will correct them?
Some long standing commuters will remember FCC being the operator when these new trains were ordered, but most people will still be clueless.
Those new Thameslink trains will be seen as a Govia investment by many, and who will correct them?
Some long standing commuters will remember FCC being the operator when these new trains were ordered, but most people will still be clueless.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
But...what's wrong with VWC now other than slightly excessive Anytime fares? It's hard to say they haven't delivered.
Neil
SaveECRewards
Member
- Joined
- 22 Jan 2015
- Messages
- 737
Considering East Coast were just meant to be taking care of the franchise until a private operator took over they were limited in being able to make changes that were too significant. Their rather boring plain livery was designed so it was easy so the next operator could apply their branding to it (although EC did roll out some interesting vinyls such as the 007 and Sky trains). They did a good job making the East Coast brand being well known, I can only imagine they'd have done even more if the government had decided to keep them as the permanent operator of this franchise and they could invest more in longer term improvements.
I would also say for most people in the north east that East Coast is a better brand than Virgin. I still have memories of the clapped out old Virgin Cross Country stock that was then replaced with overcrowded smelly 4 car voyagers. All looked pathetic next to the smart looking GNER trains.
LNW-GW Joint
Veteran Member
If Virgin Atlantic took over a route previously operated by British Airways, would you still expect to earn BA Avios points? You get Flying Club miles instead.
In any case loyalty programmes are declining and being watered down as they are unaffordable in a recessionary world.
You make it sound as though most rail travellers book their tickets via EC just for the points. I think that's a long way from reality.
I can't stand the Mixing Deck web sites.
route:oxford
Established Member
- Joined
- 1 Nov 2008
- Messages
- 4,949
I'm very grateful for Virgin their walk-up fares!
Oxford to Edinburgh (priced by XC) out morning peak, back morning peak - £290.80
Oxford to Glasgow (priced by Virgin) out morning peak, back morning peak - £139.50
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Yes!
2.5 Avios for every £1 spent on Virgin flights with my Amex Card. 4 Avios for every £1 I spend on BA flights.
Recession is over. I'm getting better deals on my schemes than every before.
This one does.
Apologies for posting this again, but I'd say a significant number of travellers use EC's website for the points.
http://www.directlyoperatedrailways....counts2014.pdf
CockneySparrow
Member
I have booked everything on EC just for the points, more often than not my journey isn't on an EC train
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
SaveECRewards
Member
- Joined
- 22 Jan 2015
- Messages
- 737
I don't see why it wouldn't be. The whole point of the scheme was to encourage people to book through eastcoast.co.uk and commission is earned on each booking. The admin overheads are much lower than operating a ticket office (so you get no points there except if booking East Coast season tickets) and the best East Coast rewards are on East Coast travel which is little overall cost to East Coast.
Would I be correct in saying you have the bmi plus Amex?
There's a little oddity that when BA took over bmi they kept on their credit card for existing members which pays better than BA's own Amex.
Question: for those saying loyalty schemes don't matter. Why is Virgin intending to give a cut of every ticket sale to Nectar? They obviously think people are attracted to loyalty schemes, they're just a bit misguided and have chosen a particularly useless one.
East Coast Rewards v Nectar
For those who don't care about loyalty schemes then they also don't care about Nectar, those who do care about loyalty schemes know Nectar is worthless.
From April Sainsbury's are halving their Nectar earnings so a useless scheme comes even more useless.
If it wasn't it wouldn't have taken them as long to increase the number of points required to achieve the rewards. We have only just seen the first increase recently and the scheme is a good three or four years old. If it was costing them they would have devalued it massively before now.
All they are effectively doing is releasing seats on services they know won't be full anyway.
The commission from all those tickets for other operators will mount up pretty quickly and the numbers using the scheme speak for themselves.
Thinking about it, I suspect one of the reasons why East Coast wanted a generous rewards scheme was because they are a one franchise operation and there is the chance to poach custom off the other main retailers eg. Stagecoach, First etc.
When Stagecoach take over EC will be their 4th franchise so they already have decent share of the market. There's no point in Stagecoach operating a generous rewards scheme to poach customers from SWT, EMT, Virgin as that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Don't get me wrong I'm gutted that EC Rewards is ending - I've had loads of free trips over the last couple of years. The next best thing that could happen now is for Nectar points to be redeemable for evouchers at the same rate as Tesco Clubcatd/RSH.
When Stagecoach take over EC will be their 4th franchise so they already have decent share of the market. There's no point in Stagecoach operating a generous rewards scheme to poach customers from SWT, EMT, Virgin as that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Don't get me wrong I'm gutted that EC Rewards is ending - I've had loads of free trips over the last couple of years. The next best thing that could happen now is for Nectar points to be redeemable for evouchers at the same rate as Tesco Clubcatd/RSH.
All very well and good but when you realise that for every point you get for a journey not on EC it costs EC 9p. Now if you never travel on them and you get to the magical 460 say for your 1st class ticket and its roughly £41 for your ticket cost to EC.
Now some may say well they would be just carting round fresh air and they may be right but what if they couldve sold the free ticket for a lot higher than what it has cost them.. And if you start adding all the commisions up against how many free tickets they give Im guessing it was starting to cost a lot and given how many people were using the scheme thats why it went up.
Now i applaud many campaigns but moaning about losing the opportunity to get free tickets is just laughable to me.
andrewkeith5
Member
Purely from an interest perspective, how are you calculating each point?
£22 was presumably set as the minimum transaction based on that being what makes it worth it on the commission...
I'm a frequent traveller with Virgin Trains on the WCML and I have used the East Coast Trains website to book tickets to build up the loyalty points as I also travel on the ECML regularly for leisure.
I travel around twice a month, at the busiest times, and so have very little scope for buying advanced tickets. As a frequent traveller with Virgin I would like to be appreciated but the derisory Nectar scheme is hardly worth bothering with at all. And even when you've "racked up" enough points as they like to describe it, you can't even spend them on a rail ticket. You have to buy something you probably don't want.
They seem to be OK with giving you half your fare back or even your full fare back if you're delayed by a few hours. I've just received £50 of travel vouchers for a delayed trip. That would take me more than 2 years to earn through Nectar points, even travelling twice a month. Over the course of an average year I'll earn more in DelayRepay refunds than the Rewards scheme.
Why do they not show their appreciation to their better customers.
I travel around twice a month, at the busiest times, and so have very little scope for buying advanced tickets. As a frequent traveller with Virgin I would like to be appreciated but the derisory Nectar scheme is hardly worth bothering with at all. And even when you've "racked up" enough points as they like to describe it, you can't even spend them on a rail ticket. You have to buy something you probably don't want.
They seem to be OK with giving you half your fare back or even your full fare back if you're delayed by a few hours. I've just received £50 of travel vouchers for a delayed trip. That would take me more than 2 years to earn through Nectar points, even travelling twice a month. Over the course of an average year I'll earn more in DelayRepay refunds than the Rewards scheme.
Why do they not show their appreciation to their better customers.
Where does this 9p value come from? I've more to say but I don't understand this bit of the calculation.
Geezertronic
Established Member
I must admit the Nectar scheme is crap. Having filled the car up a lot of times at a BP filling station and collecting Nectar points, I still barely have enough for anything decent.
So now an Esso petrol station has opened nearby, I use the wife's Tesco loyalty card and get a decent return
So now an Esso petrol station has opened nearby, I use the wife's Tesco loyalty card and get a decent return
The biggest thing about Tesco is the ability to gain money off fuel without having to make big shops in one go. It accumulates, which is far nicer than when Sainsbury's wants me to spend £90 just a few days after I do a big shop in order to get an 8p a litre petrol voucher (which will also expire in near record time).
Their voucher deals for a SIM card on a crappy network and tariff somehow seem to have an expiry that extends beyond the end of time. Funny that!
Nectar is pretty useless and now I stop myself rushing to buy something just for a few more points. Even double or triple nectar points doesn't make it worthwhile me deciding to spend loads more money as a result. Only if I was going to anyway would it be 'nice'.
I've got about £50 in value on Nectar, and that's from years of shopping at Sainsbury's (on and off) and buying petrol - arguably at a hefty premium that cancels out any benefits - at BP.
Their voucher deals for a SIM card on a crappy network and tariff somehow seem to have an expiry that extends beyond the end of time. Funny that!
Nectar is pretty useless and now I stop myself rushing to buy something just for a few more points. Even double or triple nectar points doesn't make it worthwhile me deciding to spend loads more money as a result. Only if I was going to anyway would it be 'nice'.
I've got about £50 in value on Nectar, and that's from years of shopping at Sainsbury's (on and off) and buying petrol - arguably at a hefty premium that cancels out any benefits - at BP.
Aictos
Established Member
- Joined
- 28 Apr 2009
- Messages
- 10,403
I must admit the Nectar scheme is crap. Having filled the car up a lot of times at a BP filling station and collecting Nectar points, I still barely have enough for anything decent.
So now an Esso petrol station has opened nearby, I use the wife's Tesco loyalty card and get a decent return
Hang on a second, you're using a Tesco loyalty card at Esso? didn't think that was possible?
It didn't used to be but it changed a couple of years ago. Not sure if it applies to all Esso stations but it certainly does to the ones I use.
You can earn points at my local Esso but no idea if you can use points. Presumably the money off thing doesn't work either.
The new (Tesco) pumps are excellent as you can now get the money off even when paying at pump.
Geezertronic
Established Member
Aictos
Established Member
- Joined
- 28 Apr 2009
- Messages
- 10,403
So all this time I've gone well out of my way to shop for fuel at Tescos, I could have just topped up my car at the Esso round the corner from the railway station!
Really appreciated this, very handy to know
Well, it might be changing for Virgin East Coast but I haven't seen anything for West Coast. I may be wrong though.
I might only travel twice a month, however, it is regular and I'm spending between £2500 and £3000 per year with them. I would say that's a reasonable spend per year to expect a bit of appreciation from them. And by appreciation I mean a bit more than £25-£30 in crappy Nectar points I can't spend on anything useful.
Buy 100 Virgin train tickets and get 1 free (if you travel in Virgin East Coast) doesn't sound that good to me!
dcsprior
Member
I suppose you can look at it two ways:
- Some percentage of customers will make a conscious decision which website to buy tickets from - rather than buying from the TOC they're travelling with or from whichever third party website advertises most effectively.
- Some percentage of customers will have found the previous rewards offer to be so valuable that it could sometimes be the difference between an EC train being better value than an alternative mode of transport or not. I fall into this category - I factor in the value of rewards points (currently equivalent to almost a quarter off the headline cost of a ticket) in the same way as I add in the cost of Taxi/GatEx when looking at flights as an alternative.
I wouldn't be surprised if the proportion of customers falling in to the 1st category was >10%, with points a factor for the majority, and the second category <1% - however I presume EC makes far more money in the main revenue from tickets themselves (for trains that will run anyway) than it does in the few percent commission gained on other TOCs services or saved on their own - so losing a few customers as a result of #2 could cost them more than losing a lot as a result of #1
SaveECRewards
Member
- Joined
- 22 Jan 2015
- Messages
- 737
Wouldn't it be a great loyalty scheme if they had all their franchises under the same umbrella, allowing users to spend their points on the Virgin rail network.
It would encourage someone who lives in (for example) the SWT area to make a trip up the east or west coast possibly getting to visit places that they never thought about before and they may sell more tickets in the future.
For example, someone who has enough points for a first class return will probably want to bring their partner or a friend along and that may be a paid ticket (they split the cost), or they may enjoy their break so much they book another ticket to go back or are inspired to travel elsewhere on the route.
http://saveecrewards.co.uk/blog/43-...-east-midlands-trains-users-should-support-us
As someone has already commented if East Coast was losing money out of this they could have closed the scheme themselves. I personally think Stagecoach are going with the easy option (to match West Coast) and they didn't realise most people seem to know Nectar is pretty worthless.
Nectar is getting even worse by April when the number of points at Sainsbury's is halved.
It should be noted that some train operators give cashback via sites like TopCashback and Quidco. FirstGroup franchises also give Nectar points on non First bookings so giving away a slice of your commission isn't an unusual thing it is just that East Coast had the better scheme.
Clip can you explain how each point not earned on East Coast costs them 9p? I'm sure the person who came up with this scheme knew how to use a calculator and could work out how much commission they'd earn for non-East Coast bookings. It's obvious the way they implemented the scheme they wanted to try and convince people to use East Coast for all bookings. If they were making a loss on non-East Coast booking they simply had to exclude them for points earning. The previous schemes from NXEC and GNER only included trips on their trains (but Escape and GNERtime allowed you to post in tickets, so the admin overhead would have been too high, the current EC Rewards by comparison is cheap to run).
- Status