Finding cheapest ticket over a few days

[Halsebee]

I'm sure this has been covered before but I can't find any links:

If I want to find a very cheap advance fare between two stations, and am very flexible on both date and time of travel, are there any ticketing sites that will look specifically for the cheapest fare between destinations and show availability over a whole day or number of days rather than just fares in a particular time window on a certain day?

 

[RJ]

National Rail Enquires will show the cheapest Advance fare on a given day, then you have to search to find what train that's for, but not quite in the way airline sites do with their tickets.

 

[CyrusWuff]

Worldline WebTIS sites (GWR, SWR, Lumo, Redspottedhanky - and RST Online for those who have access) let you scroll through an entire day's service rather than having to click "Earlier" or "Later" each time.

Ticket Offices that use Fujitsu STARdesktop or have access to Fujitsu Journey Planner can also do availability checks for 7 days at a time for two specific ticket types, though it takes a while.

 

[Adam Williams]

If I want to find a very cheap advance fare between two stations, and am very flexible on both date and time of travel, are there any ticketing sites that will look specifically for the cheapest fare between destinations and show availability over a whole day or number of days rather than just fares in a particular time window on a certain day?

You won't find many good services that offer a reliable view of this, because access to the availability data is controlled and rationed conservatively via a central system which has no such support for querying days or weeks of inventory at a time, and (still) does not distribute availability data to retailers in a way that would allow them to efficiently locally interrogate pricing information in order to build a tool like this.

What you will sometimes see, is retailers using their own cache of results (because they have visibility over their own customers doing searches) to try and provide a calendar view. But it won't take into account changes made outside of that ecosystem (e.g. bookings made via another channel, newly released inventory, cancellations/released seats).