I like this part in a thread, where the OP has spent a few posts finding fault with the status quo (and, let's face it, the current ticketing system is a muddle caused by layer upon layer of good intentions and attempts to please different markets, leading to a byzantine mess) - however, it's not so easy to come up with solutions...
Experience in multiple industries shows that the public don't actually want bundled prices/fares. They want the flexibility to pick and choose the services they want and need and to benefit from a lower headline price
So customers/ passengers don't want bundled prices/ fares - they prioritise flexibility instead - great - and your solution to this is...
I've already stated in multiple posts who I'd revise the fare structure.
I've also already listed many of the options. Here are some of them:
Save the fare for 24 hours - £x
Reserve your seat - from £x
Pre-book your food and drink with a discount vs onboard - from £x
Pre-book you Wifi with a discount vs onboard - £x
Upgrade to first - £x
Add flexibility (cancel up to X hours before) - £x
Lounge Access - £x
Hire a car in Glasgow - from £x
Book a hotel room in Glasgow - from £x
Book travel insurance - from £x
(The last three earn the company commission of, usually, around 10-15% from hotels/ cars and 25%+ for insurance).
If purchased online, you can hammer these things home with marketing emails even after the purchase. If someone opts out, they can still be sent them in the booking confirmation and X hours/ days until your trip emails
...oh, wait, your solution is to try to bundle things like wifi/ coffee/ hotel room/ car hire into the ticket price? Isn't that the opposite of what you're saying?
As well as the points that others have made about the problems in selling some of these products alongside the ticket, you've also got to consider that UK rail tickets already provide a lot of "insurance" for free - witness the amounts being spent on taxis for people who've missed connecting trains/ hotel rooms/ getting the ticket price refunded in the event of a delay - the UK rail industry must spend millions of pounds each year on providing this as part of the ticket price (the kind of thing that would probably only be part of top tier insurance if you bought it separately)
So is your idea that we abandon any commitment to pay for taxis/ hotel rooms for passengers caught up in disruption, so we can shave a little bit off the ticket price in the hope that enough people will pay a premium for it as an "add-on"? Otherwise, it'd have to be pretty amazing travel insurance that goes beyond what most rail passengers can expect as "standard"
I don't get this thing you, and a few other posters, have about coffee replacing fares. Food and drink is just one of many revenue generating opportunities.
On revenue, other industries have found these additional sources of revenue to be highly profitable
Yes... because they are working in completely different environments to the railway
If all railway passengers had to arrive at the station at least an hour or two before the train was scheduled to depart, had to surrender all drinks to security staff and only had a very limited range of shops "rail-side" (which were priced in accordance with the captive market) then I dare say you would sell significantly more cups of coffee on board trains than you currently do
But, as people have kept trying to explain, the large number of options at/ nearby every major UK railway station mean you can't "upsell'' as well as airlines can
You might as well point out that Alton Towers can get people to pay through the nose for a cola, who why can't we translate this market to the fairground stalls that set up in city centres each school holiday?
Specifically, how do we define long-distance? The railway network in the UK does not have a clear distinction between long distance trains and local trains such that local passengers are sometimes forced to squeeze onto long distance trains
Agreed - we keep having these threads where people try to cram in some binary notion of trains onto our messy network - often with some fancy Germanic names...
...but the reality is that we have a railway where one service caters to lots of different markets...
...we have 110mph air conditioned EMUs with First Class operating on the southern end of the WCML (350/1s) that have "commuter" doors, so some obsessives class them as being "outer suburban"...
...the UK railway doesn't fit into neat little boxes to please people with OCD...
...there was little logic to BR's branding as far as passengers would have been concerned, with Gatwick - Victoria being "InterCity" but Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - York - Durham - Newcastle apparently didn't serve sufficient cities to gain InterCity branding...
...sometimes a train goes from being the fastest service on the route to the slowest (e.g. a TPE service from Liverpool to Newcastle is the express from Liverpool to York but then the slowest train on the line from York to Newcastle, picking up the "local" stops at Thirsk/ Northallerton/ Chester le Street)...
...it can't all be as easily compartmentalised as flights are, where there's no intermediate stops to worry about - so anyone suggesting that we have one arrangement on "long distance" trains and another on other trains is opening up a huge can of worms (e.g. is Euston - New Street long distance, since the journey time is similar to Cockfosters - Heathrow - or does the West Highland Line get treated like a flagship route?)
