LNER fare rises and single leg pricing on many flows, from 11 June

[trainstrainstr]

Are they getting rid of a;; the Off Peak fares into London, like they did with Leeds/Newcastle/Edinburgh to London, thus pushing the users of those tickets onto Anytime fares?

London journeys will have the Super Off Peak Single.
Non-London journeys will have the Off Peak Single.

EDIT: For standard tickets

 

[mangyiscute]

How does this work for fares such as Reading to Newcastle, can you still buy a return for this, and does it benefit from the cost of the singles being reduced to half the cost of a return?

 

[yorkie]

London journeys will have the Super Off Peak Single.
Non-London journeys will have the Off Peak Single.

EDIT: For standard tickets

So, as I thought, this means pushing Off Peak ticket holders up to higher Anytime or Advance fares.

How does this work for fares such as Reading to Newcastle, can you still buy a return for this, and does it benefit from the cost of the singles being reduced to half the cost of a return?

LNER set the "+Any Permitted" but not the "Not via London" fares; if they do include these fares in the changes, it pushes up the cost for those in the shoulder peak and could cause problems for people who want to excess the latter fares for travel via London in one direction.

As usual, it's going to be a mess, in the name of purported 'simplicity'.

 

[CaptainHaddock]

With all the furore over TPE, today seems a good day for LNER to bury the bad news that their return fares are going to skyrocket in price and be a lot less flexible in future. Is this the beginning of the end for walk-up fares altogether?

 

[sammyg901]

Those are one key advantage. No faffing with excesses, no having to buy an Anytime Return if you're coming back peak, just buy a single when you work out what you're doing. Because of a fares quirk that means two singles are cheaper than a return when travelling at least one way in the peak from Bletchley to Euston I'm already used to it.

One of the best things about it is no faffing with route excesses or paying too much if going out and back by different routes. Just buy the relevant ticket(s) once you've decided what you're going to do.

And if you go to a booking office and ask for a day return, you'll just be sold the two singles which is functionally identical, plus you can use them in the wrong order if you want, or refund only one of them if you get a lift, or swap them with others, or whatever.

It's only a mild pain if you don't know your day of return, which must be a fairly unusual use case in the wider public.

+1 to this. I have the same from Aylesbury/Bicester and actually a couple of times my plans have changed and either I've gone back to a different station or the next day even which is easy to do when you don't already have a ticket! I've gotten into the habit now of buying each one seperately once I know I'm going on the train, takes a few seconds in the app or at a ticket machine

Of course for LNER for most journeys you wouldn't want such level of flexibility but for me the big benefit would likely be the scenario where I'm happy to commit to an advance on the outbound but want flexibility on the return. I used to like the old Virgin saver half for this. I can then book a seat on my best guess service but know that I can travel on a different train within the time restrictions without a problem

 

[mangyiscute]

+1 to this. I have the same from Aylesbury/Bicester and actually a couple of times my plans have changed and either I've gone back to a different station or the next day even which is easy to do when you don't already have a ticket! I've gotten into the habit now of buying each one seperately once I know I'm going on the train, takes a few seconds in the app or at a ticket machine

Of course for LNER for most journeys you wouldn't want such level of flexibility but for me the big benefit would likely be the scenario where I'm happy to commit to an advance on the outbound but want flexibility on the return. I used to like the old Virgin saver half for this. I can then book a seat on my best guess service but know that I can travel on a different train within the time restrictions without a problem

LNER already has a system by which you could buy a super off peak single for half of the price of a super off peak return as long as you were buying it alongside another single ticket (presumably an advance) so you could do this advance outbound and flexible return without having to purchase an extortionate anytime single. Although it did make you wonder why they couldn't just sell these tickets as normal singles (and it had its limitations for example if you wanted to travel back from a different station)

 

[RJ]

Are they getting rid of alll Off Peak fares into London, like they did with Leeds/Newcastle/Edinburgh to London, thus pushing the users of those tickets onto more costly Anytime or Advance fares?

End of the line for return rail tickets

Story in the Telegraph today, not yet available online but it has made the front page (amongst the lettuce and the balloon): RETURN tickets are to be scrapped as Rishi Sunak gives the green light to long awaited reforms of railways, Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, will announce plans...

www.railforums.co.uk

On flows from London at least with Super Off Peak fares, there are Off Peak Returns so if open returns are going then those SVRs will disappear like they did during the trial.

No idea if a SVS will be introduced at half the SVR price for those flows, but to the best of my knowledge this didn't happen during the trial.

 

[greyman42]

So if you go into the ticket office and ask for a super off peak return from York to London, are they going to say that it is not available or are they just going to give you the appropriate single tickets?

 

[Watershed]

Market research showed 61% of customers supported the SLP trial period being extended and generally indicated that SLP surpassed the old far structure in terms of flexibility, and ease of selecting ticket choices.

It was always intended to make life simpler, of course there is an element of revenue generation in there but it's swings and roundabouts. It will be cheaper for some, potentially not for others. It started because customer feedback indicated that the existing fares system was overly complex and outdated.

You know what? It's baffling how everyone jumps to the worst conclusions about LNER. Let's get this straight: there are no wicked goblins lurking behind desks, plotting schemes to squeeze every penny out of you. Sometimes, it's simply a bunch of people with big ideas, striving to innovate and make things better.

I was wondering how long it'd take to get a response from East Coast House trying to defend the indefensible!

Statistics can be skewed to say anything you want (Yes Minister refers), but if even LNER's own surveys only managed to get 61% of respondents to agree with the way they're doing SLP, you have to wonder what the travelling public really think.

There's nothing wrong with having more choice. But even if the original motivation for this really was "making life simpler", LNER have only made things more complicated through what they've done.

As for revenue generation only being an "element" of it, I don't believe that for a minute. It will be cheaper for a very small percentage of passengers, and more expensive for almost everyone who currently buys Off-Peak tickets.

Nobody is accusing individual members of staff of being wicked goblins, but LNER are being deliberately misleading about a change that could have been entirely positive for passengers (if they'd kept the existing returns), but will instead be negative for a great number of people.

Calling this innovation is grossly overselling it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

LNER claims it'll reduce overcrowding - that can only mean the price of travelling on some specific busy trains will increase which will push some people towards using road travel instead (in both directions).

I think what they more mean is that someone won't buy an Anytime Return because they need to go out in the morning peak then go "well, I've paid, so I'll use the busiest evening train back" - people are motivated to choose in each direction.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 11 May 2023 ==

So if you go into the ticket office and ask for a super off peak return from York to London, are they going to say that it is not available or are they just going to give you the appropriate single tickets?

They would ask you what day you were coming back and issue two singles, or if you didn't know suggest you wait until you do know to purchase the return. Just as they do now for the trial flows like London to Edinburgh.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 11 May 2023 ==

As for revenue generation only being an "element" of it, I don't believe that for a minute. It will be cheaper for a very small percentage of passengers, and more expensive for almost everyone who currently buys Off-Peak tickets.

For clarity this is totally unrelated to the move to singles, but the trial removed the middle step entirely, going to two steps as per most of the WCML. Some users of the old Off Peak (the old GNER Business Saver) will pay about the same by using an Anytime one way and Super Off Peak the other, but a small number of people will pay more because they'd use "shoulder peak" trains both ways and an Advance isn't applicable.

It doesn't appear to have caused mass uproar for Edinburgh passengers, and you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

 

[Hadders]

We really need to know more detail.

Removal of off peak tickets equals a price increase under the guise of simplification for users of these tickets.

Will this roll out of single leg pricing apply to tickets sold to travel between stations served by LNER trains or to tickets priced by LNER? This is significant because if it applies to all tickets priced by LNER it is going to cause all sorts of issues and anomalies.

Will current routeings be protected. When the single leg trial started in 2019 the Routeing between London and Edinburgh was changed from Any Permitted to via York removing a massive amount of flexibility around the route you could take to make this journey. Further changes of this nature would be extremely draconian.

 

[Bletchleyite]

With all the furore over TPE, today seems a good day for LNER to bury the bad news that their return fares are going to skyrocket in price and be a lot less flexible in future.

Other than the day on which you can use the return and overnight BoJ, which will affect a very small number of people outside of the enthusiast community (very rarely do people not know the day of travel) neither of those things are in the remotest bit true.

Is this the beginning of the end for walk-up fares altogether?

In short, no. The other trial being proposed, which seemed to imply one LNER route trying Advance-only ticketing but has yet to be announced, might, but not this one, which is just about simplifying things for online sales and reducing fraud from people using return halves multiple times until they go through a gateline or get stamped.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 11 May 2023 ==

Will current routeings be protected. When the single leg trial started in 2019 the Routeing between London and Edinburgh was changed from Any Permitted to via York removing a massive amount of flexibility around the route you could take to make this journey. Further changes of this nature would be extremely draconian.

Once the whole network moves to single-fare pricing this barely matters, though, as you can purchase a ticket in each direction via your desired route, or use Trainsplit to get a set of them if one isn't valid. This increases, not reduces, flexibility overall.

If you don't know if you're going ECML or WCML, just wait to purchase until you do.

 

[RJ]

LNER are being pushed to be frontrunners in fares reform, often biz head ideas sound wonderful and innovative but your average consumer just wants a fairly priced ticket that does the job....

But what they're doing is restricting how people can travel. Is it generally accepted by the powers that be that there is no place on the modern railway for passengers who want to break their journey for a day or two? Or they should be subject to more complex ticketing arrangements and a higher price for a break of journey?

 

[CyrusWuff]

With all the furore over TPE, today seems a good day for LNER to bury the bad news that their return fares are going to skyrocket in price and be a lot less flexible in future. Is this the beginning of the end for walk-up fares altogether?

In fact, DfT tacked the announcement onto the end of their release regarding TPE moving to OLR:

The decision on TPE comes as LNER today announced, after a successful trial, single leg pricing will be extended across most of their network from 11 June 2023, with tickets going on sale this Sunday.

From mid-June 2023, LNER passengers will benefit from simpler, more flexible, and better value ticketing as part of government’s plans to improve services for passengers and bring the railways into the 21st century.

Single-leg-pricing – which consists of removing return tickets in favour of single-leg tickets priced at around half the cost of the old return ticket – will simplify outdated and complicated ticketing practices.

This means people will no longer have to choose between buying a return ticket – which may not suit their plans – or taking the risk of buying 2 singles which could individually cost just £1 less than a return ticket.

For example, a person wanting to buy an off-peak single from Peterborough to Newcastle on the day of travel will now pay £63.70 as opposed to £121.50 which saves almost £60.

 

[Bletchleyite]

But what they're doing is restricting how people can travel. Is it generally accepted by the powers that be that there is no place on the modern railway for passengers who want to break their journey for a day or two?

Hardly anyone does, and a lot of tickets (arguably all Off Peaks and Super Off Peaks depending how you read the cumbersome conditions on it, but if you do interpret them as allowing it when not forced it's still outright banned on many via the restriction code) didn't allow overnight BoJ on the outward leg anyway.

Or they should be subject to more complex ticketing arrangements and a higher price for a break of journey?

Sometimes it can give a cheaper fare with the split!

Near enough nobody breaks their journey overnight on a whim, i.e. doesn't know before boarding the first train that they intend to get off somewhere and stay overnight, serious disruption aside. I've done it once ever and the break wasn't essential.

What I have done, however, is to go MKC-Glasgow one day then Glasgow-Fort William the next, then back from Fort William without the break. If Avanti also had this policy, that would be massively eased, as an MKC-FTW Off Peak Return bars BoJ outright on the outward journey, as pretty much all South East to Lancaster or points north Avanti priced tickets do (as they carry looser restrictions than south thereof). The only option for me bar Advances was to split at Glasgow both ways using two returns, and that resulted in paying more than splitting only the outward would.

 

[CaptainHaddock]

In fact, DfT tacked the announcement onto the end of their release regarding TPE moving to OLR:

Yes, exactly, I'd call tacking the announcement right at the end of a press release about a far bigger story is a classic example of burying bad news!

 

[Watershed]

No idea if a SVS will be introduced at half the SVR price for those flows, but to the best of my knowledge this didn't happen during the trial.

It won't. Of course, despite this set-up ostensibly being "simpler", you'll now have people wondering why there are Super Off-Peak tickets but no Off-Peak from London to York, and Off-Peak tickets but no Super Off-Peak from York to Edinburgh.

Even more confusingly, on some flows the only returns will be Off-Peak Day Returns.

The reality is that it's impossible to have a completely "simple" fare structure unless it's literally just Anytime and Advance, or Advance only - both of which would have deleterious effects for passengers, as Advance prices are completely unregulated.

For clarity this is totally unrelated to the move to singles, but the trial removed the middle step entirely, going to two steps as per most of the WCML. Some users of the old Off Peak (the old GNER Business Saver) will pay about the same by using an Anytime one way and Super Off Peak the other, but a small number of people will pay more because they'd use "shoulder peak" trains both ways and an Advance isn't applicable.

The thing is, they've tied it together to the move to singles. They're pretending that removing the returns is the thing that makes it simple, when in fact it's the single leg pricing that helps. And of course, they'd like people to think that one can't be done without the other.

Nobody will be paying less by moving to an Anytime Single (SOS) one way and Super Off-Peak Single (SSS) the other, because SOS's have long been priced at half the SOR. Even with the SSS' current price at £1 less than a return, SOS + SSS costs less than an SOR.

The only people who will benefit are those who make triangular journeys (rather niche), those who undertake an overnight break of journey somewhere where it's cheaper to split (even more niche), or those who make a return journey at a mixture of Anytime/Off-Peak/Super Off-Peak times and where an Advance + half-price single costs less (which is entirely at the mercy of LNER's unregulated Advance pricing).

LNER wouldn't be doing this if it weren't revenue generating. They're not doing passengers a favour here.

It doesn't appear to have caused mass uproar for Edinburgh passengers

There doesn't need to have been huge amounts of press for it to have caused people to pay more, or to switch to other modes of transport (or operators).

you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

This presupposes that returns had to be abolished for this change to be undertaken, and has been demonstrated many times previously, e.g. half-price SSH's and SOS's, Lumo pricing both returns and half-price singles, Advance tickets being priced as half-price singles, etc.... that is simply not the case.

 

[Mainline421]

In short, no. The other trial being proposed, which seemed to imply one LNER route trying Advance-only ticketing but has yet to be announced, might, but not this one, which is just about simplifying things for online sales and reducing fraud from people using return halves multiple times until they go through a gateline or get stamped.

The trouble is when you combine this with on the day advances a customer who would previously have purchased an open return may now turn up and be offered an "advance" on the next train for £2 less than an off-peak single. A few years later LNER then claim no one wants flexible tickets anymore, and then the passenger gets told all trains are "full" and has to resort to driving or getting stranded.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 11 May 2023 ==

Near enough nobody breaks their journey overnight on a whim, i.e. doesn't know before boarding the first train that they intend to get off somewhere and stay overnight, serious disruption aside. I've done it once ever and the break wasn't essential.

I can think of twice I've done that just in the past two years. With that said I do still think single leg pricing is a good idea broadly speaking.

 

[DanNCL]

I don’t understand the fuss. This makes it easier for a lot of people, and disadvantages only a small number. How many people actually buy open returns and break their journey overnight? I suspect the figure is very low. The remaining people who need open returns are they’re those who don’t know which day making their return journey, again a very small number. After that the only people who lose out from the end of open returns are those who fraudulently reuse the return portions.

Some people only need to take the train one way, for example if they’re flying abroad but could only get direct flights in one direction, in the other direction they’d take the train to get to Heathrow, Gatwick or Manchester from their home town. Another example would be Uni students at the start and end of term. There’s a not insignificant number of people who benefit from single leg pricing, almost certainly much higher than the number who lose out from it.

 

[Watershed]

Sometimes it can give a cheaper fare with the split!

You keep on saying this, but whilst it's perhaps the case once in a blue moon, it will almost always cost a lot more because the effective 'marginal rate' for each additional mile goes down the further you travel. For instance, a London to Durham SSR is £164.10, yet it's less than £10 more to travel as far as Haymarket. A Haymarket to Durham SVR is £76 - you do the math, as they say...

Near enough nobody breaks their journey overnight on a whim, i.e. doesn't know before boarding the first train that they intend to get off somewhere and stay overnight, serious disruption aside. I've done it once ever and the break wasn't essential.

Being able to plan it in advance doesn't change the fact that people will have to pay more.

 

[sheff1]

Is it generally accepted by the powers that be that there is no place on the modern railway for passengers who want to break their journey for a day or two? Or they should be subject to more complex ticketing arrangements and a higher price for a break of journey ?

It looks that way.
When I travel to places like Inverness, Aberdeen or Cornwall I almost invariably break my journey overnight in one or both directions, sometimes more than once. I can’t believe I am the only person who wishes to break up jouneys like this - after all budget hotels are a common feature on motorways / trunk roads for people who are journeying by car.

 

[yorkie]

Market research showed 61% of customers supported the SLP trial period being extended and generally indicated that SLP surpassed the old far structure in terms of flexibility, and ease of selecting ticket choices.

It was always intended to make life simpler, of course there is an element of revenue generation in there but it's swings and roundabouts. It will be cheaper for some, potentially not for others. It started because customer feedback indicated that the existing fares system was overly complex and outdated.

You know what? It's baffling how everyone jumps to the worst conclusions about LNER. Let's get this straight: there are no wicked goblins lurking behind desks, plotting schemes to squeeze every penny out of you. Sometimes, it's simply a bunch of people with big ideas, striving to innovate and make things better.

I've not jumped to any conclusions; did you follow my link in this thread to my analysis of the effect on Leeds to London "Off Peak" fares?

If LNER had halved all the available fares (and, if this made any fares superflous, abolished the more expensive ones), there would have been very few complaints and it would genuinely have been evidence of following customer feedback.

Did customers really feedback to say they wanted the cost of "Off Peak" travel to be increased to the "Anytime" price? If you have the raw data for the survey results? If I am wrong and most people are keen for simplification even if it means Anytime fares have to be bought instead of Off Peak fares, then I would admit defeat.

 

[James90012]

Well unless the Super Off Peak restrictions into London are changed to match the current Off Peak, it's a few more people potentially affected by than just those doing a break of journey!

 

[Bletchleyite]

Well unless the Super Off Peak restrictions into London are changed to match the current Off Peak, it's a few more people potentially affected by just those doing a break of journey!

With Edinburgh it indeed just involved removing the Off Peak step. However this won't affect every current user of Off Peak Returns because some will be satisfied with an Anytime Single and a Super Off Peak Single, some will use Advances, and some will just adjust their times slightly.

It didn't cause mass uproar anywhere other than here for Edinburgh that I could see, and the WCML has never had these "shoulder peak" business saver tickets and nobody is shouting for them to be introduced. (LNER Super Off Peak restrictions are near enough the same as Avanti Off Peak ones).

 

[miklcct]

The only people who will benefit are those who make triangular journeys (rather niche)

Making triangular journeys isn't a niche pursuit. It is very common for people to go out e.g. one way hike, or e.g. evening after work, which makes the journey a triangular one.

 

[yorkie]

...It didn't cause mass uproar anywhere other than here for Edinburgh that I could see,...

People either chose not to travel, stumped up the extra, or if they were really fussed and spent just a minute researching they would have bought a ticket to somewhere like West Hampstead at the same price as the old SVR (with a free cross London transfer thrown in), so it is not surprising there wasn't a huge fuss. It's also not newsworthy; no media outlet is going to run with this as a news story.

So you can't use a lack of "uproar" to justify fare rises as somehow being popular!

It looks that way.
When I travel to places like Inverness, Aberdeen or Cornwall I almost invariably break my journey overnight in one or both directions, sometimes more than once. I can’t believe I am the only person who wishes to break up jouneys like this - after all budget hotels are a common feature on motorways / trunk roads for people who are journeying by car.

Indeed, for long distance journeys such breaks must be common. The rail industry could extend the validity of singles for longer distance journeys, but I suspect this won't happen; I suspect they would argue that making tickets have terms which benefit customers is too "complex".

 

[RailWonderer]

If they really wanted to reduce fradulent use of return halves why not just let you pick a day for returning - same day or next, and have the ability to use any highlighted choice of off peak trains on the website and same for peak, super off peak? This is a poorly thought out plan to shake things up and at a stretch, a revenue grab.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I would have thought we should be doing everything to get as many people on the railway as possible. Increasing the number of transactions people have to make will make people think again about flying from Edinburgh or Leeds to Heathrow

 

[Mainline421]

If they really wanted to reduce fradulent use of return halves why not just let you pick a day for returning - same day or next, and have the ability to use any highlighted choice of off peak trains on the website and same for peak, super off peak? This is a poorly thought out plan to shake things up and at a stretch, a revenue grab.

At that point there's no benefit to not having single leg pricing, and you lose everything gained.

 

[mangyiscute]

To be honest, will it increase the difficulty of buying a ticket? Almost everyone purchasing a ticket for longer distance journeys will be doing so online before the trip, and ultimately you will still do the exact same process on the website/app of search for the stations, choose an outward service, choose a return service and then get told what tickets to buy - I don't see how it makes a difference. For shorter journeys sure where one is likely to use a ticket machine, but longer ones which is what LNER mainly cater to it doesn't matter.