Advance tickets allocations, mechanics

[Halsebee]

Just interested to know how TOCs allocate the number of advances tickets for flows and how many at each price points. But interested not in straightforward flows like Bath-London which is all on one train operator, GWR, and one actual train usually.

I'd like to know how it is worked out for a journey like Westoh Super Mare to Arundel, via Salisbury. Involves at least two GWR trains and a Southern train. Presume not many people buy this ticket.

So, is the advance availability based solely on the Bristol Southampton or Portsmouth service advance allocation, or would it include restrictions from the Weston to Bristol segment or input from Southern for their section?

And how is this all decided, does a pricing manager sit down every week and pore through advance tickets for all sorts of relatively poorly used flows and decide how many should be available on each service etc, or is it done by some sort of algorithm which can be tweaked perhaps?

 

[Watershed]

Advances work as a number of tiers (often lettered or numbered) of fares at different price. For example, in descending order of price GWR use W1A, W1B, W1C etc. for most of their first class Advances and W2A, W2B, W2C etc. for standard class.

TOCs then control whether or not they release availability for each given tier in the Rail Availability and Reservations Service (RARS), for when retailers check to see what tiers are available.

Most TOCs have implemented sophisticated revenue management systems (often similar to the ones that airlines etc. use), which automatically control the availability of each tier based on factors such as expected demand for the time of day, day of week and time of year. Concerts, sports matches, school holidays, Bank Holidays and even the average weather forecast can also influence it. So the vast majority of it will be automated; however there will be individual trains where Pricing Managers will intervene and increase/decrease/close availability.

For journeys involving multiple trains, Advance availability is constrained by the reservable train with the least availability; non-reservable trains do not impact the availability of Advances, so long as the route and operator restrictions of the ticket are met.

For multi-TOC journeys it is obviously more complicated; setting these up requires an agreement between the relevant TOCs, which (AIUI) dictates the revenue distribution and will likely contain provisions for how to map across tiers of Advances. So GWR's W2A tier may be mapped to Southern's SLV, for excample.

 

[Haywain]

however there will be individual trains where Pricing Managers will intervene and increase/decrease/close availability.

In reality, it's unlikely to be Pricing Managers getting involved in this, as most TOCs will have specialist reservation and revenue optimisation teams who do all that. However, that doesn't change the principle of how things work as you described.

 

[158801]

Many years ago, each reservable train had an allocation of advance tickets. Once they were sold out then it was a walk up fare.

Even though the public only see a "price" that is shown as "advance" there are in fact various different advance ticket types. These could be "advance 1", "advance 2", "advance 3" etc.

So let's say you're making a journey from Bolton to Cardiff changing in Manchester and Bristol parkway departing at 0818 and all trains are reservable.

If all trains have "advance 1" tickets available then the price would be £20.
If Bolton to Manchester and Bristol to Cardiff have "advance 1" available but Manchester to Bristol only has "advance 2" then you'll see a £30 fare.

Of course this is where spilt tickets come on in. You could potentially split ((if the sums are right) and buy 2x “advance 1” and 1x “advance 2”.

Also each train will have segments. An Avanti train may be split EUS-RUG / RUG-PRE / PRE-CAR / CAR-GLC. “advance 1” tickets may not be available RUG-PRE but they are for each other segment.

 

[MrJeeves]

Also each train will have segments. An Avanti train may be split EUS-RUG / RUG-PRE / PRE-CAR / CAR-GLC. “advance 1” tickets may not be available RUG-PRE but they are for each other segment.

There's this horrible concept of "logical" and "physical" availability in the reservations system, too, where one represents how much space is left on the train in terms of revenue management (for a specific ticket type, route code, between specific locations, with specific ticket origin/destinations, and even what Railcard you're using) and the other is the actual seating availability.

When you make a query to the system to say "hey, how many of ticket XYZ from A to B can we sell on this train?" it will respond with logical availability.

The trouble is that these can get out of sync, where there's still logical availability for an advance tier, but there's no physical availability to allocate for a ticket sale. This often happens if a train operator changes what rolling stock will run a service, such as swapping a 9 car for a 5 car, for example.

You don't find this out until you actually make a reservation as part of a ticket purchase and get an error back from the reservations system saying there is actually no availability. Then, despite it knowing this, you'll do another journey search and ask it again if you can sell the same ticket between the same places on the same train and it'll say "yes, there's availability"!

 

[Joe Paxton]

Advances work as a number of tiers (often lettered or numbered) of fares at different price. For example, in descending order of price GWR use W1A, W1B, W1C etc. for most of their first class Advances and W2A, W2B, W2C etc. for standard class.

TOCs then control whether or not they release availability for each given tier in the Rail Availability and Reservations Service (RARS), for when retailers check to see what tiers are available.

Most TOCs have implemented sophisticated revenue management systems (often similar to the ones that airlines etc. use), which automatically control the availability of each tier based on factors such as expected demand for the time of day, day of week and time of year. Concerts, sports matches, school holidays, Bank Holidays and even the average weather forecast can also influence it. So the vast majority of it will be automated; however there will be individual trains where Pricing Managers will intervene and increase/decrease/close availability.

For journeys involving multiple trains, Advance availability is constrained by the reservable train with the least availability; non-reservable trains do not impact the availability of Advances, so long as the route and operator restrictions of the ticket are met.

For multi-TOC journeys it is obviously more complicated; setting these up requires an agreement between the relevant TOCs, which (AIUI) dictates the revenue distribution and will likely contain provisions for how to map across tiers of Advances. So GWR's W2A tier may be mapped to Southern's SLV, for excample.

[My bolding.]

This is the element I was always a bit intrigued by - particularly when Advances priced by one TOC (e.g. for a longer journey) could undercut the Advances priced by another TOC. And this could happen even when the TOC that set the Advance fares provided the shorter leg of a two-TOC journey.

The other interesting thing about it was that whilst TOCs were not meant to communicate or collude when it came to setting (non-Advance) fares for flows they owned, there obviously had to be an agreement between TOCs for multi-TOC Advance fares - but perhaps this was a more general agreement, which meant situations such as I described above where one TOCs Advance undercut the other were not weeded out. (Or maybe such scenarios were just considered too obscure, given the majority of passengers search for a ticket for the actual journey they are going to make.)

Anyway the idea that TOCs are limited in communicating with each other on pricing is a thing of the past, given we are now in a transitionary phase heading towards GBR.

 

[Watershed]

[My bolding.]

This is the element I was always a bit intrigued by - particularly when Advances priced by one TOC (e.g. for a longer journey) could undercut the Advances priced by another TOC. And this could happen even when the TOC that set the Advance fares provided the shorter leg of a two-TOC journey.

The other interesting thing about it was that whilst TOCs were not meant to communicate or collude when it came to setting (non-Advance) fares for flows they owned, there obviously had to be an agreement between TOCs for multi-TOC Advance fares - but perhaps this was a more general agreement, which meant situations such as I described above where one TOCs Advance undercut the other were not weeded out. (Or maybe such scenarios were just considered too obscure, given the majority of passengers search for a ticket for the actual journey they are going to make.)

Anyway the idea that TOCs are limited in communicating with each other on pricing is a thing of the past, given we are now in a transitionary phase heading towards GBR.

They weren't meant to collude but the claims that various people have made over the years, suggesting that any sort of communication would be illegal, are plainly untrue. I don't know how agreement is reached on pricing (as opposed to revenue distribution) or indeed whether that is part of the agreement at all. However I suspect that there have been some emails exchanged about Advances undercutting local fares, much in the same way as Chiltern introduced additional restrictions on morning arrivals into London Terminals to their Super Off-Peak fares (likely at the behest of Southeastern).

 

[Sleepy]

A good example where multi-TOC Advance journey doesn't work very well is Norwich to Cornwall, most of the time there is only availability on 0932 and 2100 (into Sleeper inc. first class tickets which the Sleeper doesn't provide) It will be interesting how GBR deals with this sort of nonsense?