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Avanti: reservations and refurbished/non-refurbished pendos

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Adam Williams

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I'm looking at this service (VT362000 VT7175) which ran on Wednesday: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:L33700/2023-08-30#allox_id=0 - RTT shows it had 11 coaches.

Can someone please confirm I'm understanding this correctly:

  1. 390129 is a refurbished pendolino
  2. I believe coaches C and U are therefore the unreserved coaches (perhaps set up as counted place)
  3. On refurbished pendolinos, coach G is standard class, and does not have the first class/SP layout
  4. On this train, coach G should have a total of 74 seats
I have checked previous weeks and it has run with 390134 (refurbed?), 390104 (refurbed?), 390009 (not refurbed?).

In the reservations system, it appears that Avanti are just using the old unrefurbished pendo set-up for all instances of this service - coach G has been put in as standard premium on multiple future dates that I have tried.
To work around the fact that this will obviously be wrong on many occasions, coach G is simply blanket-marked as unreservable within Avanti's own seat picker as well as coaches U and C.

My questions, for folks with more of an understanding of train planning then me, are:

  • Are Avanti going to do this until the entire fleet is refurbished? I believe 36 units have been refurbished by this point, which is a majority.
  • Is it really the case that they have no idea what stock will actually be used for these services in advance? At what point do they know?
  • Why can't they allow reservations in coach G, and just suspend them if an unrefurbished pendo needs to be diagrammed to run without much notice?
 
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OscarH

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Coach G is only relevant for 11-car units, not on 9-cars. All the 11's have been refurbed so there are no more coach class conversions to be done.

I think, as with U, G has never been reservable even before the refurb program, so they can mess with lengths without worrying (whether they do/should plan lengths in advance so they could do reservations is another question)
 
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Adam Williams

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OscarH said:
Coach G is only relevant for 11-car units, not on 9-cars. All the 11's have been refurbed so there are no more coach class conversions to be done.
Click to expand...
So really, none of the coach Gs on 11 car services should be marked up as standard premium in the data at all (because it's misleading/wrong), and all of them should have proper seat maps showing all 74 standard class seats (even if they're all unreservable)? Given that the services are all marked as mandatory reservations, this raises an interesting point - is there enough counted place availability to cover all the seats in coach G, as well as the other unreserved coaches?

<L o="EUS" d="MAN" s="VT7175" t="27092023" a="SEAT">
<C u="K" s="1" c="1211" d="AA/WC P COACH K 1ST 1211"></C>
<C u="J" s="2" c="1210" d="AB/WC P COACH J 1ST /W 1210"></C>
<C u="H" s="3" c="1319" d="AC/WC P COACH H STD P 1319"></C>
<C u="G" s="4" c="1288" d="AD/WC P COACH G STD P UR 1288"></C>
<C u="U" s="5" c="1207" d="AK/WC P COACH U STD CP 1207"></C>
<C u="F" s="6" c="1259" d="AL/WC P COACH F STD 1259"></C>
<C u="E" s="7" c="1257" d="AJ/WC P COACH E STD 1257"></C>
<C u="D" s="8" c="1256" d="AE/WC P COACH D STD /W 1256"></C>
<C u="C" s="9" c="1203" d="AF/WC P COACH C STD CP /S 1203"></C>
<C u="B" s="10" c="1254" d="AG/WC P COACH B STD /W 1254"></C>
<C u="A" s="11" c="1206" d="AH/WC P COACH A STD /Q /C 1206"></C>
</L>

Do Avanti document their unreservable coaches anywhere on their website?
 
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Adam Williams

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Kite159

Kite159

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I presume they won't want to bring in reservations for coach G just in case an 11 coach pendo has to be swapped for a 9 coach set. Leaving coach G as fully unreserved means no passengers will get reserved in a coach which doesn't exist and has to fight it out in coach C for a seat if a 9 coach set gets stepped up at Euston to cover for a late running 11 coach set

Similar to coach U
 
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Bletchleyite

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Kite159 said:
I presume they won't want to bring in reservations for coach G just in case an 11 coach pendo has to be swapped for a 9 coach set. Leaving coach G as fully unreserved means no passengers will get reserved in a coach which doesn't exist and has to fight it out in coach C for a seat if a 9 coach set gets stepped up at Euston to cover for a late running 11 coach set

Similar to coach U
Click to expand...

Indeed. They've always done it so they can treat the two as interchangeable and I don't see any sense in changing that. Though they could do with selling some counted places - I don't believe they do, or at least not many, which results in "sold out" for trains that really don't need to be.
 
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Toby268

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Bletchleyite said:
Indeed. They've always done it so they can treat the two as interchangeable and I don't see any sense in changing that. Though they could do with selling some counted places - I don't believe they do, or at least not many, which results in "sold out" for trains that really don't need to be.
Click to expand...
They’ve been doing counted places since Covid. Currently they max out based on whether it’s planned to be an 11 car or 9 car, however atm it only does counted places for C and U on an 11. This is causing its own problems with selling loads of tickets without reservations and putting them down as counted places, whilst loads more people not under counted places come with no reservations, creating overcrowding. More so on 9 cars. 11 cars are a dream to work for busy trains. Especially after the refurb, with an extra unreserved STD carriage and extra large luggage racks
 
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Adam Williams

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OscarH said:
Counted places aren't the answer to this, stopping blatantly misleading passengers is
Click to expand...

To me it's an admission that the TOC's sales channels which aren't journey-planner-based (ticket offices, "dumb" TVMs) have been given an unfair advantage over online retailers, which are required to prevent sale of these services which are - as you state - misleadingly specified as "Mandatory reservations" in the timetable data. Even when there is potentially a whole coach of seats that may well turn up on the day and nobody could sell real (or counted place) reservations for.
 
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