Advances - do we need some changes to T&Cs?

[Bletchleyite]

In light of the LNER trial, it's worth noting that things have very much changed with regard to Advances. They started off as APEX under BR as a deep discount ticket requiring 7 days advance booking (and the SuperAPEX at 14 days) and developed further as "Virgin Value" into their current form. But they still, despite now being the main fare for long distance travel, have some nasty bits in the T&Cs that I really am unconvinced are of benefit and are just passenger-unfriendly for no reason.

Some thoughts therefore:

£10 admin fee
In the days when there was admin involved in reissuing a ticket, this made sense to stop people repeatedly changing a ticket. But changing an e-ticket requires no admin at all, it's purely a computer exercise. This should therefore be binned for Advance ticket changes entirely, allowing added flexibilty at no real cost to the railway (the income from them will be small as most people don't change their booking).

Premier Inn even refund you the difference if you change to a cheaper stay! (Though I think this is more because of how their accounting works than to be specifically nice to you - the website doesn't say anywhere that this happens, it just does). I can see why the railway may choose not to go that way, but charging a fee for a change done wholly self service just doesn't make sense. It might for Ryanair whose business model is basically to make money out of fees rather than fares, but the railway isn't Ryanair and doesn't (and shouldn't) use that business model.

Break of journey
There is no longer any need for a break of journey restriction on Advance tickets, all it is doing is causing some staff to be awkward and refuse people going through gatelines to end short in disruption or pop for a smoke or the chippy. Now Advances are available for almost every journey, it appears to me to be very rare for people to be able to undercut a fare by booking a longer distance Advance, too. So why not remove this and allow starting/ending short and popping out between trains, and just stick with the idea that travel just has to be on the booked trains if it's made at all, which is what intuitively makes sense? Of course if you start short you lose your reserved seat, but that's no great problem in itself, just sit somewhere else.

More flexible changes
Why not consider allowing changing anything for anything? You can on some low cost airlines, some don't restrict it to the same route. The value of the fare is just put into the new fare. That has other advantages, such as if you do want to start short you can change your ticket to one specifically for that so you keep your reservation.

Pricing and splits
I think this was considered at one point - but why not simplify things so instead of &Connections you just do Advances by vehicle journey as a split, just ticketed together in one PDF? That'd remove a lot of anomalies. So if you booked a journey involving say Northern and Avanti, it'd just issue a Northern Advance and an Avanti Advance together in one PDF file, and if you changed it it'd just apply the value of both to whatever you changed it to. "Proper splits" would probably remain specialist for things like Trainsplit (i.e. where you have multiple tickets on one train), but this sort of thing would remove the issues that are caused by TOCs using quotas differently by letting each manage their own as they wish. If on a given train there were no Advances, a walk-up single would just be issued for that bit and included in the price.

Rebooking and validity in disruption
Advances are of course automatically valid on the next train if your train is cancelled, not a right I think should go away. But often doing this is quite unpleasant, with the next train often being super-busy - this is one reason I prefer walk-up tickets so I can re-route as I choose in disruption. So why not respect the passenger, and allow them to rebook online for any connection they like that day? Obviously Delay Repay would be based on the next train, but if people are willing to go away for a bit and have a pint/meal/whatever so they can try again when it's quieter and have a booked seat, this is something the railway should be encouraging, not discouraging. Another option would just be that, as DB do it, if your booked train is cancelled or delayed more than a certain amount (30 minutes might be reasonable?) the ticket effectively just becomes an Anytime Day Single or can be endorsed to become one - ideally automatically which shouldn't be hard when the itinerary exists.

And sort out the accounting issue that causes you not to be able to remove a TOC restriction!

Similarly, this free rebooking could further be permitted to another train of the passenger's choice within say 12 months, including all tickets in the same booking (no point rebooking the outward but not the return), with a decent period of time to plan a new trip and rebook (say one month from the day of validity).

Summary
In short, if the Advance is to be the main long distance fare, these are a set of things that the railway could do that wouldn't cost them much (if anything in some cases) and make it all a bit friendlier and less Ryanair!

 

[MrJeeves]

£10 admin fee
In the days when there was admin involved in reissuing a ticket, this made sense to stop people repeatedly changing a ticket. But changing an e-ticket requires no admin at all, it's purely a computer exercise. This should therefore be binned for Advance ticket changes entirely, allowing added flexibilty at no real cost to the railway (the income from them will be small as most people don't change their booking).

It's worth remembering that there are fees associated with issuing/cancelling tickets, too, as well as the costs of developing and maintaining the systems needed to perform the automated tasks. It's not like there is zero cost for this, and with RDG's commission being 5% of ticket cost, retailers already have high cost of sales with the current fees structure.

I'm not certain of what the exact fees are for E-Ticket issuance/cancellation/etc or whether the ToD CTR fees apply if they are are cancelled before collection, etc. though.

Now Advances are available for almost every journey

...in your area. Still not "almost every journey" in decent swathes of commuter/metro-land of the South East.

I think this was considered at one point - but why not simplify things so instead of &Connections you just do Advances by vehicle journey as a split, just ticketed together in one PDF?

Surely this would mean making every service reservable, else some &Connections ticketed journeys wouldn't be possible anymore.

be permitted to another train of the passenger's choice within say 12 months, including all tickets in the same booking

Bit hard with the current timetabling and availability release systems...

 

[Bletchleyite]

It's worth remembering that there are fees associated with issuing/cancelling tickets, too, as well as the costs of developing and maintaining the systems needed to perform the automated tasks. It's not like there is zero cost for this, and with RDG's commission being 5% of ticket cost, retailers already have high cost of sales with the current fees structure.

There's zero actual cost for it bar 0.0000001p's worth of electrons.

If the fee structure for using the likes of the reservations system introduces a fee for this, which isn't the same thing as a cost, then the TOC-to-retailer pricing model is flawed and needs fixed. Being able to change tickets is an integral part of operating a reservation system, and the idea of modelling the pricing for that part of the system's build as a fee per ticket change makes as much sense as modelling car use on a per-mile basis for anything other than business travel mileage claims, i.e. none whatsoever.

...in your area. Still not "almost every journey" in decent swathes of commuter/metro-land of the South East.

Almost every train operated by the majority of TOCs is now reservable. Maybe not Southeastern and Merseyrail, but that's just two TOCs with a particularly Luddite approach!

If you're talking about stuff like SWR's innersuburbans or London Overground, I bet the majority of people just book the long distance ticket from the relevant London terminus and use contactless to get there. (Which needs, to add something to the list, to carry the same protection as a through ticket in terms of allowing rebooking if the connection is missed!)

Bit hard with the current timetabling and availability release systems...

Some sort of e-voucher would work for that.

A workable halfway house might be a choice between a refund-and-rebook (as you'll likely get a similar fare if it's not soon) or the ability to rebook at no extra charge within say 7 days even if the chosen train costs more.

The key is respecting the passenger has been inconvenienced and thus offering them all the flexibility that practically can be offered in terms of rescheduling or refunding their journey. If you inconvenience someone as a business, you should be bending over backwards to help them on their terms, not standing waving at a board with a long list of T&Cs on it.

 

[MrJeeves]

There's zero actual cost for it bar 0.0000001p's worth of electrons.

...and the staff to create and maintain the systems as I said
...and the cost of running those systems on hardware (cloud or on-prem)
...and the costs to run and maintain a network of ticket machines

and the idea of modelling the pricing for that part of the system's build as a fee per ticket change makes as much sense as modelling car use on a per-mile basis for anything other than business travel mileage claims, i.e. none whatsoever.

It's not a fee per-change, but fees for each ticket issued. It just happens that a change of train involves issuing a new ticket.

which isn't the same thing as a cost

It's a cost to the retailer, which somehow must be reclaimed from its customers. Might as well make it a cost by adding booking fees to offset it instead!

Maybe not Southeastern and Merseyrail

Or Southern/Thameslink/GX/GN, SWR (e.g., Portsmouth to Southampton), Chiltern and some more...

 

[Bletchleyite]

...and the staff to create and maintain the systems as I said
...and the cost of running those systems on hardware (cloud or on-prem)
...and the costs to run and maintain a network of ticket machines

Absolutely none of which is directly associated to the sale or change of a specific ticket. It's a pricing model and pricing models can be changed.

I am talking about costs, not what someone has arbitrarily decided to base charges to retailers upon.

It's not a fee per-change, but fees for each ticket issued. It just happens that a change of train involves issuing a new ticket.

It's a cost to the retailer, which somehow must be reclaimed from its customers. Might as well make it a cost by adding booking fees to offset it instead!

In which case it should be changed to a slightly higher fee for each ticket sold rather than an Advance change counting as an issue. Or if an Advance change is made with a higher fare applying to the new ticket, that could be a percentage of the difference added on top.

I don't know why, but it seems to be a common view on this Forum that any present procedure or fee structure is immutable - it clearly isn't. Even the law can be changed where appropriate!

If the cause of the £10 admin fee is a new percentage charge on the full value of the ticket, then that's just nonsensical and needs changing.

Or Southern/Thameslink/GX/GN, SWR (e.g., Portsmouth to Southampton), Chiltern and some more...

Of course that's not immutable either.

 

[JonathanH]

Almost every train operated by the majority of TOCs is now reservable.

That doesn't mean that every journey using those trains has advance tickets.

Take for instance Paddington to Reading. Every fast train is reservable. GWR would lose a fortune if passengers could stop short at Reading on a Paddington to Oxford advance.

It happens elsewhere too that advance fares are not available for intermediate flows.

There is no longer any need for a break of journey restriction on Advance tickets, all it is doing is causing some staff to be awkward and refuse people going through gatelines to end short in disruption or pop for a smoke or the chippy.

What possibly needs to happen to fix this issue is that the advance ticket must be scanned at the start and end of a journey. It could then be valid for break of journey without restriction, where there is some connection time as part of the booking, but with a surcharge levied where the journey is not completed as required by the terms of the ticket.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Take for instance Paddington to Reading. Every fast train is reservable. GWR would lose a fortune if passengers could stop short at Reading on a Paddington to Oxford advance.

I bet they actually wouldn't simply because most people will now just be using contactless for convenience, plus you'd be restricting yourself to only 2 of the many fast trains per hour.

 

[Starmill]

The admin fee is incredibly unlikely to be staying at £10. The ORR will need to have something to show for their investigation - they're putting good resources into it and will need something to show for it. A voluntary agreement to amend the Conditions to lower the cap on fee per ticket would be in the interest of both sides I think.

Of course, there's a possibility of the refund fee and the fee for amendments to a non-refundable ticket having divergent caps, but we'll find out the decision on this before too long I suspect.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 Feb 2024 ==

I bet they actually wouldn't simply because most people will now just be using contactless for convenience, plus you'd be restricting yourself to only 2 of the many fast trains per hour.

It's a bit of a problem for London - Bicester Village. No Advance tickets and a very popular and expensive (£32) journey.

Currently almost nobody will mess about buying an Advance to Oxford, by whichever route is cheaper, and then a flexible ticket to Bicester Village, but plenty of people would if you could just stop short.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Of course, there's a possibility of the refund fee and the fee for amendments to a non-refundable ticket having divergent caps, but we'll find out the decision on this before too long I suspect.

To prevent people buying tickets speculatively and refunding lots of them, and to discourage refund fraud, I can see a case for a refund fee in the manner Trainline does it, which is pretty much a percentage capped out at £10.

For Advances I can see no case for any fee at all.

It's a bit of a problem for London - Bicester Village. No Advance tickets and a very popular and expensive (£32) journey.

Currently almost nobody will mess about buying an Advance to Oxford, by whichever route is cheaper, and then a flexible ticket to Bicester Village, but plenty of people would if you could just stop short.

I again doubt they would but for a different reason - the Far Eastern tourists who seem to make up most people who go there from London wouldn't know about such things and wouldn't do that.

There's also stuff like the Lancaster vs. Preston evening peak cliff, but I suspect any move to LNER style all-Advances pricing would get rid of that artefact of pre-privatisation fares and Lancaster would at least end up the same price as Preston.

The railway seems to spend an awful lot of time and money trying to prevent enthusiasts from eking out what they see as a little too much extra value from tickets, when by and large they aren't things that most people would actually do because they largely aren't obvious. How many people used splits before Trainsplit became a thing? Very few I suspect. I didn't even know one I use all the time now until Trainline pointed it out to me!

 

[Starmill]

What possibly needs to happen to fix this issue is that the advance ticket must be scanned at the start and end of a journey. It could then be valid for break of journey without restriction, where there is some connection time as part of the booking, but with a surcharge levied where the journey is not completed as required by the terms of the ticket.

Sounds like a huge amount of unnecessary work to me to fit platform validators with scanners as well. Literally thousands would be needed.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 Feb 2024 ==

I again doubt they would but for a different reason - the Far Eastern tourists who seem to make up most people who go there from London wouldn't know about such things and wouldn't do that.

There's also stuff like the Lancaster vs. Preston evening peak cliff, but I suspect any move to LNER style all-Advances pricing would get rid of that artefact of pre-privatisation fares and Lancaster would at least end up the same price as Preston.

I know realistically very few people would do it, but that's not really the point. The point is that Chiltern and the government see that as money they could have being taken away from them, even if, in reality it's actually better for all parties that some of the rules are reformed.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I know realistically very few people would do it, but that's not really the point. The point is that Chiltern and the government see that as money they could have being taken away from them, even if, in reality it's actually better for all parties that some of the rules are reformed.

And that is a fundamental part of the problem. The railway is obsessed with technicalities that in reality hardly anyone would "abuse", and in order to do this they screw over honest passengers who just want to pop out for a bag of chips between trains, or those who want to end a journey short because a delay has resulted in a need to wait 59 minutes for a connection for a 5 minute journey where absolutely anyone with any sense would just take a taxi (the Kenilworth thing that came up recently on another thread).

I've ended countless late evening journeys at MKC because it's pointless waiting around for nearly an hour (under the previous timetable there was one really annoying one hour gap at a time I often got there). The gateline is usually open, but if it wasn't stopping me doing so would just be plain silly. (I have when money has been tight and I've had nothing else to do waited for it to ensure a nice fat Delay Repay claim though...it's nice to have the choice ).

 

[Starmill]

And that is a fundamental part of the problem. The railway is obsessed with technicalities that in reality hardly anyone would "abuse", and in order to do this they screw over honest passengers who just want to pop out for a bag of chips between trains, or those who want to end a journey short because a delay has resulted in a need to wait 59 minutes for a connection for a 5 minute journey where absolutely anyone with any sense would just take a taxi (the Kenilworth thing that came up recently on another thread).

I've ended countless late evening journeys at MKC because it's pointless waiting around for nearly an hour (under the previous timetable there was one really annoying one hour gap at a time I often got there). The gateline is usually open, but if it wasn't stopping me doing so would just be plain silly. (I have when money has been tight and I've had nothing else to do waited for it to ensure a nice fat Delay Repay claim though...it's nice to have the choice ).

The industry love to wax lyrical about how amazing value their Advance tickets are. But as soon as there's an opportunity to rinse foreign tourists out of £32 per head, the idea of offering a cheaper price to fill unused capacity magically disappears.

 

[ChrisC]

Now Advances are available for almost every journey,

It certainly hasn‘t been my experience when trying to do longer east to west journeys from the East Midlands. These journeys do not use inter city trains and often require the use of trains from a number of TOC’s.

I have just quickly randomly looked up a few journeys from Mansfield and Lincoln and cannot find any Advance tickets for journeys to lots of destinations in the North West or East Anglia. I know from personal experience that they are not available from Mansfeld to Blackpool North or Mansfield to Lowestoft. Try also journeys like Lincoln to Preston or Lincoln to Sheringham.

I’m not saying that I don’t disagree with most of the rest of content in your post.

 

[Gaelan]

£10 admin fee
In the days when there was admin involved in reissuing a ticket, this made sense to stop people repeatedly changing a ticket. But changing an e-ticket requires no admin at all, it's purely a computer exercise. This should therefore be binned for Advance ticket changes entirely, allowing added flexibilty at no real cost to the railway (the income from them will be small as most people don't change their booking).

Premier Inn even refund you the difference if you change to a cheaper stay! (Though I think this is more because of how their accounting works than to be specifically nice to you - the website doesn't say anywhere that this happens, it just does). I can see why the railway may choose not to go that way, but charging a fee for a change done wholly self service just doesn't make sense. It might for Ryanair whose business model is basically to make money out of fees rather than fares, but the railway isn't Ryanair and doesn't (and shouldn't) use that business model.

Break of journey
There is no longer any need for a break of journey restriction on Advance tickets, all it is doing is causing some staff to be awkward and refuse people going through gatelines to end short in disruption or pop for a smoke or the chippy. Now Advances are available for almost every journey, it appears to me to be very rare for people to be able to undercut a fare by booking a longer distance Advance, too. So why not remove this and allow starting/ending short and popping out between trains, and just stick with the idea that travel just has to be on the booked trains if it's made at all, which is what intuitively makes sense? Of course if you start short you lose your reserved seat, but that's no great problem in itself, just sit somewhere else.

More flexible changes
Why not consider allowing changing anything for anything? You can on some low cost airlines, some don't restrict it to the same route. The value of the fare is just put into the new fare. That has other advantages, such as if you do want to start short you can change your ticket to one specifically for that so you keep your reservation.

All of these make a lot of sense.

Pricing and splits
I think this was considered at one point - but why not simplify things so instead of &Connections you just do Advances by vehicle journey as a split, just ticketed together in one PDF? That'd remove a lot of anomalies. So if you booked a journey involving say Northern and Avanti, it'd just issue a Northern Advance and an Avanti Advance together in one PDF file, and if you changed it it'd just apply the value of both to whatever you changed it to. "Proper splits" would probably remain specialist for things like Trainsplit (i.e. where you have multiple tickets on one train), but this sort of thing would remove the issues that are caused by TOCs using quotas differently by letting each manage their own as they wish. If on a given train there were no Advances, a walk-up single would just be issued for that bit and included in the price.

Currently many local journeys at the end of a long-distance trip are cheap or free, and I'd be hesitant to lose that - people shouldn't be penalized for living somewhere without a direct connection. This would also leave many anomalies unfixed - I think what we need is the ability for Advance fares to be calculated from a number of separately-priced segments, but still be issued as a single ticket.

It's also not clear how this would combine with rerouting during disruption.

Rebooking and validity in disruption
Advances are of course automatically valid on the next train if your train is cancelled, not a right I think should go away. But often doing this is quite unpleasant, with the next train often being super-busy - this is one reason I prefer walk-up tickets so I can re-route as I choose in disruption. So why not respect the passenger, and allow them to rebook online for any connection they like that day? Obviously Delay Repay would be based on the next train, but if people are willing to go away for a bit and have a pint/meal/whatever so they can try again when it's quieter and have a booked seat, this is something the railway should be encouraging, not discouraging. Another option would just be that, as DB do it, if your booked train is cancelled or delayed more than a certain amount (30 minutes might be reasonable?) the ticket effectively just becomes an Anytime Day Single or can be endorsed to become one - ideally automatically which shouldn't be hard when the itinerary exists.

And sort out the accounting issue that causes you not to be able to remove a TOC restriction!

Similarly, this free rebooking could further be permitted to another train of the passenger's choice within say 12 months, including all tickets in the same booking (no point rebooking the outward but not the return), with a decent period of time to plan a new trip and rebook (say one month from the day of validity).

I'd strongly advocate for the DB-style Anytime Day Single option - making already-disrupted people faff with reservations is almost certainly going to add complexity. Maintaining TOC restrictions during disruption also makes absolutely no sense during disruption, especially in the post-franchising era.

Beyond the things you've mentioned, I'd also remove the ticket condition that you sit in your booked seat - this is of course already unenforced, so may as well codify that.

But frankly I really don't like advances as a concept - for all but a small fraction of London-Scotland style journeys, the railway needs to be competing with the car, and that means walk-up flexibility and predictable, affordable prices. I suspect it's possible to spread demand by other means - perhaps by offering reservations for a non-refundable £1 (credited towards the price of the ticket), and prominently showing number of reservations in journey planners, on the theory that nobody will travel on a busy train if given the choice.

 

[Bletchleyite]

But frankly I really don't like advances as a concept - for all but a small fraction of London-Scotland style journeys, the railway needs to be competing with the car, and that means walk-up flexibility and predictable, affordable prices. I suspect it's possible to spread demand by other means - perhaps by offering reservations for a non-refundable £1 (credited towards the price of the ticket), and prominently showing number of reservations in journey planners, on the theory that nobody will travel on a busy train if given the choice.

I don't often use them either, though I might more often if the things in my post were resolved. But this thread is created on the basis that the increasing move towards them is unstoppable, which it probably is. (For all the bad publicity I can't see the LNER trial being seen as unsuccessful).

 

[Starmill]

It certainly hasn‘t been my experience when trying to do longer east to west journeys from the East Midlands. These journeys do not use inter city trains and often require the use of trains from a number of TOC’s.

I have just quickly randomly looked up a few journeys from Mansfield and Lincoln and cannot find any Advance tickets for journeys to lots of destinations in the North West or East Anglia. I know from personal experience that they are not available from Mansfeld to Blackpool North or Mansfield to Lowestoft. Try also journeys like Lincoln to Preston or Lincoln to Sheringham.

I’m not saying that I don’t disagree with most of the rest of content in your post.

There's absolutely loads of costly journeys left where there's no Advance. In addition to the Bicester Village - London example discussed above:

Stafford - Newcastle
Radley - London
Kings Lynn - London
Reading - Brighton
Manchester - Settle
Clacton-on-Sea - Stansted Airport
Northampton - Watford Junction
Mansfield - Hereford

And that's just a selection I'm familiar with. Some of those have outrageously expensive Anytime and Off Peak fares. Most have very competitive end-to-end times by train. Now yes you'll get Advances if you know the tricks of the trade, but no doubt someone like LNER will come along and accuse you of "distorting the market" if so.

 

[Kite159]

Bring back the "book with confidence" scheme where you can 'refund' your advance ticket for website credit if for whatever reason you can't make that train. Also reduce the £10 fee to change the tickets to maybe a nominal £1 plus the difference.

Moreover ditch the short-distance advance fares, like Shipley to Bradford, Ashburys to Manchester Piccadilly etc and have that price as the standard single price.

 

[Trainbike46]

I don't often use them either, though I might more often if the things in my post were resolved. But this thread is created on the basis that the increasing move towards them is unstoppable, which it probably is. (For all the bad publicity I can't see the LNER trial being seen as unsuccessful).

I really hope you're wrong about this; the LNER trial will make the train more expensive, and rolling it out wider would just make it even worse.

Maybe it is time to start bullying the government hard about it (though I doubt my MP will care at all, given LNER is on a different island and rail is a devolved matter in NI, so my normal option of writing to my MP is unlikely to be succesful)

 

[CyrusWuff]

It's a bit of a problem for London - Bicester Village. No Advance tickets and a very popular and expensive (£32) journey.

Chiltern used to offer Advance tickets between Marylebone and Bicester Village (and still offer them between Marylebone and Bicester North) but informed sources say they were withdrawn due to the sheer volume of people who tried to use them on the wrong trains.

 

[Starmill]

Chiltern used to offer Advance tickets between Marylebone and Bicester Village (and still offer them between Marylebone and Bicester North) but informed sources say they were withdrawn due to the sheer volume of people who tried to use them on the wrong trains.

Oops! Did they used to be offered to Haddenham & Thame Parkway too? The fare and distance is similar to Bicester North and Islip where as you say they are offered, but of course doing it this way prevents any splitting opportunities.

 

[CyrusWuff]

Oops! Did they used to be offered to Haddenham & Thame Parkway too? The fare and distance is similar to Bicester North and Islip where as you say they are offered, but of course doing it this way prevents any splitting opportunities.

Off the top of my head, I believe they were offered for Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Princes Risborough and Haddenham & Thame Parkway until mid-2013.

Since then, they've not been available any further South than Bicester.

 

[cactustwirly]

I bet they actually wouldn't simply because most people will now just be using contactless for convenience, plus you'd be restricting yourself to only 2 of the many fast trains per hour.

If there was a significant cost saving they would! A contactless single from London to Reading isn't cheap especially in peak times

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 6 Feb 2024 ==

In light of the LNER trial, it's worth noting that things have very much changed with regard to Advances. They started off as APEX under BR as a deep discount ticket requiring 7 days advance booking (and the SuperAPEX at 14 days) and developed further as "Virgin Value" into their current form. But they still, despite now being the main fare for long distance travel, have some nasty bits in the T&Cs that I really am unconvinced are of benefit and are just passenger-unfriendly for no reason.

Some thoughts therefore:

£10 admin fee
In the days when there was admin involved in reissuing a ticket, this made sense to stop people repeatedly changing a ticket. But changing an e-ticket requires no admin at all, it's purely a computer exercise. This should therefore be binned for Advance ticket changes entirely, allowing added flexibilty at no real cost to the railway (the income from them will be small as most people don't change their booking).

Premier Inn even refund you the difference if you change to a cheaper stay! (Though I think this is more because of how their accounting works than to be specifically nice to you - the website doesn't say anywhere that this happens, it just does). I can see why the railway may choose not to go that way, but charging a fee for a change done wholly self service just doesn't make sense. It might for Ryanair whose business model is basically to make money out of fees rather than fares, but the railway isn't Ryanair and doesn't (and shouldn't) use that business model.

Break of journey
There is no longer any need for a break of journey restriction on Advance tickets, all it is doing is causing some staff to be awkward and refuse people going through gatelines to end short in disruption or pop for a smoke or the chippy. Now Advances are available for almost every journey, it appears to me to be very rare for people to be able to undercut a fare by booking a longer distance Advance, too. So why not remove this and allow starting/ending short and popping out between trains, and just stick with the idea that travel just has to be on the booked trains if it's made at all, which is what intuitively makes sense? Of course if you start short you lose your reserved seat, but that's no great problem in itself, just sit somewhere else.

More flexible changes
Why not consider allowing changing anything for anything? You can on some low cost airlines, some don't restrict it to the same route. The value of the fare is just put into the new fare. That has other advantages, such as if you do want to start short you can change your ticket to one specifically for that so you keep your reservation.

Pricing and splits
I think this was considered at one point - but why not simplify things so instead of &Connections you just do Advances by vehicle journey as a split, just ticketed together in one PDF? That'd remove a lot of anomalies. So if you booked a journey involving say Northern and Avanti, it'd just issue a Northern Advance and an Avanti Advance together in one PDF file, and if you changed it it'd just apply the value of both to whatever you changed it to. "Proper splits" would probably remain specialist for things like Trainsplit (i.e. where you have multiple tickets on one train), but this sort of thing would remove the issues that are caused by TOCs using quotas differently by letting each manage their own as they wish. If on a given train there were no Advances, a walk-up single would just be issued for that bit and included in the price.

Rebooking and validity in disruption
Advances are of course automatically valid on the next train if your train is cancelled, not a right I think should go away. But often doing this is quite unpleasant, with the next train often being super-busy - this is one reason I prefer walk-up tickets so I can re-route as I choose in disruption. So why not respect the passenger, and allow them to rebook online for any connection they like that day? Obviously Delay Repay would be based on the next train, but if people are willing to go away for a bit and have a pint/meal/whatever so they can try again when it's quieter and have a booked seat, this is something the railway should be encouraging, not discouraging. Another option would just be that, as DB do it, if your booked train is cancelled or delayed more than a certain amount (30 minutes might be reasonable?) the ticket effectively just becomes an Anytime Day Single or can be endorsed to become one - ideally automatically which shouldn't be hard when the itinerary exists.

And sort out the accounting issue that causes you not to be able to remove a TOC restriction!

Similarly, this free rebooking could further be permitted to another train of the passenger's choice within say 12 months, including all tickets in the same booking (no point rebooking the outward but not the return), with a decent period of time to plan a new trip and rebook (say one month from the day of validity).

Summary
In short, if the Advance is to be the main long distance fare, these are a set of things that the railway could do that wouldn't cost them much (if anything in some cases) and make it all a bit friendlier and less Ryanair!

Last time I checked advances were only available for a limited number of flows and not always available on every train.

 

[JonathanH]

I bet they actually wouldn't simply because most people will now just be using contactless for convenience, plus you'd be restricting yourself to only 2 of the many fast trains per hour.

What makes you think you can only book London to Oxford advances or indeed between any two locations on the direct trains?

 

[Starmill]

Off the top of my head, I believe they were offered for Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Princes Risborough and Haddenham & Thame Parkway until mid-2013.

Since then, they've not been available any further South than Bicester.

Gotcha. Thank you.

 

[AdamWW]

If the cause of the £10 admin fee is a new percentage charge on the full value of the ticket, then that's just nonsensical and needs changing.

I suppose this is what you get for the refund-and-replace model.

The seller ends up with the costs of refunding the original ticket and of issuing the new one.

 

[London Trains]

I'll give a very simple answer to this thread (that many won't agree with), just get rid of advance tickets entirely.

The prices of off-peak and anytime tickets can then be reduced to a cost slightly higher than the cheapest advance fares at the moment, which will encourage more people onto the railway. The railway should be entirely walk-up, passengers should not have to book in advance just to get cheaper fares.

 

[Starmill]

I'll give a very simple answer to this thread (that many won't agree with), just get rid of advance tickets entirely.

The prices of off-peak and anytime tickets can then be reduced to a cost slightly higher than the cheapest advance fares at the moment, which will encourage more people onto the railway. The railway should be entirely walk-up, passengers should not have to book in advance just to get cheaper fares.

This is a great approach, and has been used to enormous success in the Netherlands and Switzerland (with only very minor exceptions for some international products, routes with supplements required, and the new NS advance purchase products etc etc).

Unfortunately, there's also an approach by those railways to understand capacity and try to plan for it, accepting the enormous costs of infrastructure which can accommodate some very long trains, using double-deck stock where needed, and having capacity in stations for the number of trains needed. In addition they're accepting that there's a need for running loads very long trains around at quiet times which are badly under-utilised. It would take vast capital spend to get more routes in this country onto that kind of basis, it's just not the way we've planned and built at all.

 

[m0ffy]

The industry love to wax lyrical about how amazing value their Advance tickets are. But as soon as there's an opportunity to rinse foreign tourists out of £32 per head, the idea of offering a cheaper price to fill unused capacity magically disappears.

Much like SNCF’s pricing from CDG to Marne-la-Vallee. £40 per person for an eight minute journey, once every two hours.