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Is the NRE Advance booking dates page accurate?

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trainophile

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I was just looking at a trip in the first week after new year, w/com 6th Jan. Unfortunately Trainsplit is giving the error page as they don't seem to go that far, despite it being the 12th week from now. I wanted to be ahead of the game to get the best priced tickets as I know they sell out fast.

I tried various other operators' sites, with limited success as some of them are so complicated. Ended up on GWR after some considerable effort, with it not liking my password, and when I tried to re-register telling me that email address is already in use. Somehow or other I managed to get there in the end, and was offered crazy cheap prices for Chester to Llandudno on 7th January and back again on 9th Jan. £2.75 each way with railcard o_O . I can't even work that out off BR Fares, but having established it wasn't selling me Child tickets as it accepted my Senior railcard, I went ahead and bought them.

On the NRE page it currently says TfW tickets are presently available up to 2nd Jan for weekdays, so I'm not sure how GWR managed to offer them for 7th and 9th.

Are railcard prices calculated by subtracting 33% from the full price? Or is there some other formula?

Also is there any chance that Trainsplit might at some stage extend its booking horizon? I'm presuming the forum site is the same as they are both part of Raileasy? I much prefer to use them but it's frustrating that they have a limited future booking period. I abandoned even trying on the TfW site as it's awful and impossible to use. TPE was messy, I was running out of ideas so Googled "buy train tickets in UK" and GWR came up. Not particularly user friendly but they did offer these ridiculously cheap Advances for my dates.

 
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MrJeeves

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Are railcard prices calculated by subtracting 33% from the full price? Or is there some other formula?
33.4%, rounded down to the nearest 5p.

Also is there any chance that Trainsplit might at some stage extend its booking horizon? I'm presuming the forum site is the same as they are both part of Raileasy? I much prefer to use them but it's frustrating that they have a limited future booking period. I abandoned even trying on the TfW site as it's awful and impossible to use. TPE was messy, I was running out of ideas so Googled "buy train tickets in UK" and GWR came up. Not particularly user friendly but they did offer these ridiculously cheap Advances for my dates.
Extending the horizon requires work to detect and handle set-swaps on some operators.

The issue you describe with the error is that our websites and apps each have slightly different logic to determine what the horizon is, and won't match the backend server which will think someone is doing something cheeky and block the search.

It's usually off by maybe a day or two, though, and I doubt TfW would sell out of all their £2.75 advances tomorrow. :D
 

skyhigh

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Trainsplit will also sell the same fares for the dates you are looking at?

 

trainophile

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Trainsplit will also sell the same fares for the dates you are looking at?


That's the first place I went to but kept getting an error message, which I assumed was due to it being too far ahead. Must be a glitch in my settings or something.
 
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