Expansion of LNER 70-min flex trial area ("Simpler Fares")

[yorksrob]

I've been thinking about how it is quite hard to get the point across to many people, about what the problem is here - because it's so easy for LNER et al to obfuscate.

Perhaps what's needed is a "save our off peaks" campaign.

Focus on what is being abolished and what is lost.

1. Ability to buy a ticket right up to departure. Always. No "sold out" quotas.
2. Certainty of price
3. Flexibility over entire day (outside peaks).

Probably not worth over-complicating with stuff about break of journey on returns etc.

Then anything that LNER or anyone else counters as a newer/better ticket is simple to assess against those three criteria. Does it meet them yes or no?

At the moment it's too easy for them to bamboozle with detail that covers up the essential fact that this long standing component of the UK rail fare structure is being entirely abolished.

Agreed.

A campaign - "need to travel at short notice ? That'll be (insert anytime fare)."

 

[AdamWW]

I've been thinking about how it is quite hard to get the point across to many people, about what the problem is here - because it's so easy for LNER et al to obfuscate.

Perhaps what's needed is a "save our off peaks" campaign.

Focus on what is being abolished and what is lost.

1. Ability to buy a ticket right up to departure. Always. No "sold out" quotas.
2. Certainty of price
3. Flexibility over entire day (outside peaks).

Probably not worth over-complicating with stuff about break of journey on returns etc.

Then anything that LNER or anyone else counters as a newer/better ticket is simple to assess against those three criteria. Does it meet them yes or no?

At the moment it's too easy for them to bamboozle with detail that covers up the essential fact that this long standing component of the UK rail fare structure is being entirely abolished.

Also 4. Regulated fares.

 

[AngusH]

Some data I saw recently in the September rail passenger surveys:

I'm not sure if these charts agree with the official narrative?

Originally:

https://d3cez36w5wymxj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/26114108/Rail-User-Survey-train-operator-results.pdf

(I've clipped these specific charts out of slide 19/page 19 of the PDF)




Value for money has declined by 16 percentage points.


Though passenger satisfaction as a whole is still ok
down only 4 percentage points.



time series in blocks from (8 Apr - 26 June 2022) to (28 June - 15 Sept 2024)


In absolute fairness I should point out that other intercity operators actually score worse for value for money, but none has seen as big a drop.

 

[Krokodil]

I've been thinking about how it is quite hard to get the point across to many people, about what the problem is here - because it's so easy for LNER et al to obfuscate.

Perhaps what's needed is a "save our off peaks" campaign.

Focus on what is being abolished and what is lost.

1. Ability to buy a ticket right up to departure. Always. No "sold out" quotas.
2. Certainty of price
3. Flexibility over entire day (outside peaks).

Probably not worth over-complicating with stuff about break of journey on returns etc.

Then anything that LNER or anyone else counters as a newer/better ticket is simple to assess against those three criteria. Does it meet them yes or no?

At the moment it's too easy for them to bamboozle with detail that covers up the essential fact that this long standing component of the UK rail fare structure is being entirely abolished.

A campaign will need a simplistic message to get across. Three word slogans etc. "Surge pricing" needs mentioning too.

 

[PG]

Perhaps what's needed is a "save our off peaks" campaign.

Who is going to run such a campaign? You're basically going up against the government, since LNER are a DOHL TOC. Certainly wouldn't trust the current opposition party since they were in power when the trial started, and the mainstream media seem to be nonchalant or swallow the guff that LNER are sprouting.

 

[AdamWW]

Certainly wouldn't trust the current opposition party since they were in power when the trial started

Hmmm...I'm not sure politics works like that.

and the mainstream media seem to be nonchalant or swallow the guff that LNER are sprouting.

Which is why a campaign is needed. If all they get is the biased information from LNER/DfT then that's what they're likely to reproduce.

Who is going to run such a campaign? You're basically going up against the government

That's not unsual for campaigns though, is it? In some ways I'd have thought it easier to protest against the government than a company.

Maybe someone should start a government petition (for publicity purposes, not because it would directly achieve anything).

And yes before someone points it out I'm aware that someone could be me.

 

[A S Leib]

Sorry, we can’t accept your petition – “Scrap the LNER fare change trial”.

It calls for an action relating to a particular individual, or organisation outside of the UK Government or Parliament.

We can't accept petitions which call for actions with regard to named individuals, organisations or businesses. This includes petitions relating to individual train operating companies. We could accept a petition calling on the Government to require all train operators to offer off-peak tickets.

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards:

How petitions work

petition.parliament.uk

If you want to try again, click here to start a petition:

Start a petition - Petitions

petition.parliament.uk

Thanks,
The Petitions team

–the response I got when trying to make a petition at the start of the year, so the petition would need to be clear in what it's aiming to do and be something which the government very clearly has control over.

 

[AdamWW]

–the response I got when trying to make a petition at the start of the year, so the petition would need to be clear in what it's aiming to do and be something which the government very clearly has control over.

Good for you trying to actually do something rather than just talk about it.

The response seems a bit off given that LNER is publicly owned though, and that it's pretty clearly not a trial to determine if just LNER should act in this way but for the government controlled rail industry as a whole.

 

[Sleepy]

So why can't Passenger Focus do something useful and survey LNER passengers to see what tickets they actually want ?

 

[BRX]

–the response I got when trying to make a petition at the start of the year, so the petition would need to be clear in what it's aiming to do and be something which the government very clearly has control over.

I think there could be a petition to retain off peak fares throughout the network as part of any general fares reform that the government considers.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

X

So why can't Passenger Focus do something useful and survey LNER passengers to see what tickets they actually want ?

Because Passenger Focus fills the same role as Ofcom, Ofwat and others - to fill the space where a consumer protection organisation might be expected, taking good care not to do anything provocative that might discomfort those who appoint them. They do nothing useful, but crucially make sure that there is no manifest gap that might prompt pressure for an organisation that actually promoted consumer interests.

 

[Rail101]

Hmmm...I'm not sure politics works like that.



Which is why a campaign is needed. If all they get is the biased information from LNER/DfT then that's what they're likely to reproduce.



That's not unsual for campaigns though, is it? In some ways I'd have thought it easier to protest against the government than a company.

Maybe someone should start a government petition (for publicity purposes, not because it would directly achieve anything).

And yes before someone points it out I'm aware that someone could be me.

In terms of getting it covered by the media, many journalists are time poor and their resources stretched. If you want their attention the best ways to do it are 1) find their email address (should be pretty easy) and send them a snappy, clickbaity subject line to get their interest up and then explain as briefly as possible in the email what the issue is - make it about passengers being ripped off etc, then offer to explain further. I'd also try on X (Twitter) and Bluesky. After all, journalists want stories that will do well with their readership. Local and regional papers are good for it. I'd also specifically target transport journalists.

 

[Trainbike46]

In terms of getting it covered by the media, many journalists are time poor and their resources stretched. If you want their attention the best ways to do it are 1) find their email address (should be pretty easy) and send them a snappy, clickbaity subject line to get their interest up and then explain as briefly as possible in the email what the issue is - make it about passengers being ripped off etc, then offer to explain further. I'd also try on X (Twitter) and Bluesky. After all, journalists want stories that will do well with their readership. Local and regional papers are good for it. I'd also specifically target transport journalists.

This is a very good idea!

People on this forum are likely one of the few groups of people who are well-placed to run such a campaign - might be worth bringing up at the next forum meal?

Other things to consider:
- do you know anyone who has been involved with campaigns before? if so, I'd suggest meeting with them to talk and ask for their input
- Petitions are unlikely to do anything by themselves, but can be worth it to try and create extra stories or media attention

 

[A S Leib]

It might be worth a separate thread, but another option could be commissioning independent polls. I don't think that would be particularly cheap; I think a Survation poll commissioned / funded by Ballot Box Scotland, readers and the Herald cost ~£4000, but I don't know if cost scales with the number of questions asked or granularity desired.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

I don't know if cost scales with the number of questions asked or granularity desired.

It normally would with any market research company.

Yes, market research through a dedicated company is rather expensive - but it's usually very accurate and with properly weighted data and a balanced set of respondents; you don't get those safeguards if you just run a typical internet poll or similar.

The more established a market research company is, the more reputable the results will be and the more likely they are to be taken seriously when you present them to whoever it is you want to present them to.

Try asking someone like Kantar for a quote.

 

[Bletchleyite]

A campaign will need a simplistic message to get across. Three word slogans etc. "Surge pricing" needs mentioning too.

I do find it interesting how "surge pricing" for gig tickets isn't considered acceptable in the eyes of the public but is for transport despite it only being relatively recent (basically since the low-cost airlines started around 2000ish) it seems to be perfectly acceptable. (BR did do "APEX" fares earlier than this, perhaps since the late 1980s, but they had very poor availability and a long booking horizon, so almost nobody used them - the fares most people used were fixed, even the Advance Saver/SuperAdvance which could be booked one day before).

Surge pricing is essentially what it is.

The other issue is that it is likely that those passengers who did travel found the price acceptable and thus, due to reduced overcrowding, probably did have a better journey. This is Roger Ford's argument and might be why passenger surveys are the wrong way to deal with this.

I do think the other trials coming up next year that are mentioned upthread will be educational, though. I can't see this being as popular for a short journey like Manchester-Leeds or even a medium one like London-Birmingham - indeed I can see it pushing a lot more people to WMT/Chiltern in the short term - and it's already the case that Avanti London-Birmingham services are, shall we say, a bit quiet compared to those two, showing that what people want for short journeys is simple, cheap flexibility. Indeed I do suspect that the reason LNER didn't choose Leeds for this trial (that's what they used for the single fare pricing one) was because it was perhaps too short for the outcome to be able to be stated as overwhelmingly positive as they seem to be trying to do.

 

[Haywain]

the fares most people used were fixed, even the Advance Saver/SuperAdvance which could be booked one day before

Fixed, but subject to availability, so even booking the day before the only certainty was the walk-up fare.

 

[Tetchytyke]

I do find it interesting how "surge pricing" for gig tickets isn't considered acceptable in the eyes of the public but is for transport despite it only being relatively recent (basically since the low-cost airlines started around 2000ish) it seems to be perfectly acceptable.

I don't think anyone finds demand-based pricing "acceptable" - witness the annual wailing about holidays being more expensive in school holidays- but people do generally understand the dynamics of supply and demand.

The gig tickets issue is more about the bait-and-switch: advertising it at one price then jacking the price up when you're in the queue.

LNER are, of course, trying to disguise the bait-and-switch with this trial. The ongoing reputational problem, though, is that unlike the airlines* they can sell more tickets than there are seats, and the ones who don't get the guaranteed seat are usually the ones who've paid the highest fares.

(*yes airlines do routinely overbook, but there is a financial consequence if they are over-aggressive on it. The railways just shrug and make you sit in a luggage rack.)

 

[Bletchleyite]

Fixed, but subject to availability, so even booking the day before the only certainty was the walk-up fare.

The APEX/SuperAPEX were, but I'm almost certain that, at the start at least, the Advance Saver/SuperAdvance were just a flat discount for booking the day before and were available as long as actual seat reservations were. Which is a quota, yes, but a fairly large one. I certainly don't recall ever failing to get one, whereas getting an APEX/SuperAPEX was really difficult (particularly as you needed the same quota both ways).

But in terms of this trial...the Saver/SuperSaver were reasonably priced and so there wasn't any risk of you being charged a small fortune, which you do risk if wishing to travel on the trial routes on LNER, and with London-Manchester Anytime being about the same price as London-Edinburgh despite being half the distance the WCML will potentially be even worse. I can almost (almost!) cope with paying £200 for London to Edinburgh (it's cheaper than some air fares), whereas paying nearly that for London to Manchester is just price gouging - you can (for a day trip) hire a fairly nice car and fuel it for that, let alone drive your own.

And then you've got other aspects, like loss of break of journey rights (which few realise could get them in trouble if they got dropped off at Newcastle instead of Berwick, say - I know actually *breaking* a journey is something most people don't do, not to mention those small number of staff who refuse people going through a gateline to have a smoke when changing trains on an Advance) and loss of refundability (which the railway loves, because there's a lot of refund fraud going on and removing refunds removes that fraud).

 

[yorksrob]

I do find it interesting how "surge pricing" for gig tickets isn't considered acceptable in the eyes of the public but is for transport despite it only being relatively recent (basically since the low-cost airlines started around 2000ish) it seems to be perfectly acceptable. (BR did do "APEX" fares earlier than this, perhaps since the late 1980s, but they had very poor availability and a long booking horizon, so almost nobody used them - the fares most people used were fixed, even the Advance Saver/SuperAdvance which could be booked one day before).

Surge pricing is essentially what it is.

The other issue is that it is likely that those passengers who did travel found the price acceptable and thus, due to reduced overcrowding, probably did have a better journey. This is Roger Ford's argument and might be why passenger surveys are the wrong way to deal with this.

I do think the other trials coming up next year that are mentioned upthread will be educational, though. I can't see this being as popular for a short journey like Manchester-Leeds or even a medium one like London-Birmingham - indeed I can see it pushing a lot more people to WMT/Chiltern in the short term - and it's already the case that Avanti London-Birmingham services are, shall we say, a bit quiet compared to those two, showing that what people want for short journeys is simple, cheap flexibility. Indeed I do suspect that the reason LNER didn't choose Leeds for this trial (that's what they used for the single fare pricing one) was because it was perhaps too short for the outcome to be able to be stated as overwhelmingly positive as they seem to be trying to do.

Have passengers really been exposed enough to "surge pricing" in the real sense though.

My understanding is that for a concert, there's no equivalent to a walk-on fare to fall back on.

If we move to more withdrawal of off-peak fares, the surge nature of the remaining advanced purchase offerings may become more visible, and the public will become more aware of its malign effects.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 16 Dec 2024 ==

LNER are, of course, trying to disguise the bait-and-switch with this trial. The ongoing reputational problem, though, is that unlike the airlines* they can sell more tickets than there are seats, and the ones who don't get the guaranteed seat are usually the ones who've paid the highest fares.

There's nothing to stop the high payers requesting (and likely obtaining) a seat reservation though.

 

[BRX]

Just received this message from a relative travelling from London to Inverness today on LNER.

"Warned on boarding that late ticket buyers may find no spare seats. But amazed at how many 'reserved' seats departed unoccupied".

They are travelling on a ticket that was bought last night, due to a change of plan as a result of not feeling well. That ticket price was effectively capped by the off-peak single price. If that hadn't existed I wonder what they'd have been selling it at. The consequence might have been that I'd have been putting someone on the sleeper seats tonight (their originally booked ticket) when they really weren't feeling up to it. That, or they'd have had to stay in London an extra day. Or just accept getting rinsed with an Anytime fare.

In the process of booking last night, they were getting all the "only X tickets left" stuff that I'm fairly sure was generated by LNER's fake quote stuff. Another little thing to add to the stress of the process. And of course, as the text message confirms, there's no shortage of seats at all.

 

[Bletchleyite]

In the process of booking last night, they were getting all the "only X tickets left" stuff that I'm fairly sure was generated by LNER's fake quote stuff. Another little thing to add to the stress of the process. And of course, as the text message confirms, there's no shortage of seats at all.

This is more an issue with the fake compulsory reservations thing than the fare increase trial, though - people who don't know which train they will take just pick one at random. It has caused a significant increase in unclaimed reservations on Avanti too. If anything the fare increase trial should reduce it, unless a lot of people have wised up to the option of deliberately picking the wrong train on a 70 minute ticket to avoid a higher fare.

The railway clearly has a short memory. In the early days of Trainline you always got a reservation if any were available, though it still sold the ticket were they not. This led to a lot of unused reservations, at which point they changed the way it worked so you had to specifically say you wanted a reservation if you picked a walk up ticket, and the problem reduced. Of course now we've gone full circle, with the added problem of people having to select a train with them available so they get created even where the passenger has no intention of using them.

 

[BRX]

This is more an issue with the fake compulsory reservations thing than the fare increase trial, though

I know - but it seems to spring from the same kind of attitude, where really they'd rather just not have to bother with any of the messiness associated with non train-specific tickets, and who cares what that means for passengers.

 

[A S Leib]

Drill into rail’s latest passenger and financial figures and there is a silver lining for those who believe nationalising trains might deliver more reliability, lower subsidies and fares.
But there is a huge caveat: success will depend on ministers choosing to copy an operating model that has proved to be hugely successful on Britain’s East Coast intercity route for a quarter of a century. This is where three privately owned non-subsidised train companies, known as open access, compete aggressively with the state-run operator.
The chancellor Rachel Reeves and the new transport secretary Heidi Alexander (the fifth one in as many years) must take note of this model if they want to avoid a future of soaring subsidies and flatlining passenger numbers. It should be encouraged and rolled out across Britain’s intercity network.

Next year ministers will create the state-run Great British Railways (GBR) and say they want to see open access competition continue “where it adds value”. The new evidence shows that it doesn’t just do this on a significant scale, it also delivers a critical competitive discipline that can help prevent any risk of GBR sliding into financial and sector decline.
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) statistics show that where intercity trains don’t compete for passengers they are expensive, require big subsidies, have struggled to get their finances and passengers back since Covid and endure poor passenger satisfaction.
Overall, rail income and journeys are down. The sector has not recovered to pre-Covid levels, with one important exception — the East Coast Main Line where real on-track competition delivers for customers. The line’s state-run main operator, LNER, is the only intercity service that has been able to increase its number of passenger journeys.
LNER had 21.2 million passengers in 2019-20 and 24.2 million in 2023-24. On the rival West Coast Main Line, the monopoly operator, Avanti, is still struggling to get passengers back. In 2019-20 it carried 37.5 million but in 2023-24 only 32.8 million. On the Great Western Main Line numbers were 82.6 million in 2023-24, down from 97 million in 2019-20.
LNER is also eating into the subsidy it requires from government. In 2021-22 it needed £288 million from the taxpayer but last year this fell to £39 million. LNER will soon come under GBR and if its growth continues, alongside its competitors, then it can become subsidy free.
This model gives ministers a huge opportunity to get GBR right. Let’s hope they take it.

East Coast Main Line shows how to run the railways

The author doesn't seem to be a transport specialist, but I think the lack of mention of the LNER fare reform – I don't think it's right to keep calling it a trial when they seem so intent on pushing it through – shows a lack of attention / understanding of the issue in the media.

 

[yorksrob]

East Coast Main Line shows how to run the railways

The author doesn't seem to be a transport specialist, but I think the lack of mention of the LNER fare reform – I don't think it's right to keep calling it a trial when they seem so intent on pushing it through – shows a lack of attention / understanding of the issue in the media.

To be fair, the article seems to be more a paean to open access competition, rather than the fares "trial".

 

[PG]

East Coast Main Line shows how to run the railways

The author doesn't seem to be a transport specialist, but I think the lack of mention of the LNER fare reform – I don't think it's right to keep calling it a trial when they seem so intent on pushing it through – shows a lack of attention / understanding of the issue in the media.

Although Avanti doesn't currently have competition from an OA operator it will have in the not too distant future. Also LNR do take a slice of passengers for certain destinations.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

East Coast Main Line shows how to run the railways

This appears a classic attempt to confuse correlation with causality.

There are more Porsches in Chelsea than in Sunderland. But delivering a fleet of Porsches to Sunderland won't transform its economy. Porsches are a consequence of a thriving economy, not a driver of one.

Open Access operators will be attracted to the highest-demand lowest-elasticity flows. But that doesn't mean that OA would transform the prospects for less promising routes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The problem here is that LNER generally is a pretty well run and popular operation despite being a bit pricey. They just have one very, very, very bad policy that ruins the rest of it.

 

[Tetchytyke]

They just have one very, very, very bad policy that ruins the rest of it.

And it’s a policy that is very hard to explain to a lay person why it is so bad. Most people buy advance tickets for these types of trips anyway, they don’t buy the off peak or super off peak ticket. So they don’t understand how they act as a price cap and they don’t understand why abolishing them is so bad.

 

[Bletchleyite]

And it’s a policy that is very hard to explain to a lay person why it is so bad. Most people buy advance tickets for these types of trips anyway, they don’t buy the off peak or super off peak ticket. So they don’t understand how they act as a price cap and they don’t understand why abolishing them is so bad.

Indeed. It's sort of the perfect storm.

The loss of flexibility is annoying to me but equally I accept that almost nobody travels from London to Edinburgh on anything other than an Advance, unless they unwittingly end up with a flexible ticket because it's all that's left, and even if they do they probably don't realise that's what they've got. But everyone suffers if the price cap is removed.

The problem is perhaps that "the railway is expensive" is so widely known that it getting maybe 20-30% more expensive (which seems to be what's happened) isn't really registering.

(the 70 minute ticket isn't in itself a bad idea but could have just been added to the offering)