Availability of SeatFrog upgrades on CrossCountry

[enginedin]

I've been looking through the availability of SeatFrog upgrades on CrossCountry services. The hourly departures from Edinburgh (at the :04 or :05) consistently have upgrades available, except for the daily 0820 Aberdeen - Plymouth, or the 13:05 Edinburgh to Plymouth/Cardiff, when there are upgrades only available on the occasional day (regardless of how far in advance you look). Does anyone know of a good reason why this might be the case?

 

[VT 390]

Could it be that these services are expected to be busier/more popular due to them providing once a day direct service options, especially 1V60 (08:20 Aberdeen to Plymouth), therefore Cross Country may have restricted availability on these services.

I have not travelled on the Cardiff service but I have taken the Aberdeen service a few times in first class and it is usually noticeably busier compared to other Cross Country Edinburgh services.

 

[AlterEgo]

I've been looking through the availability of SeatFrog upgrades on CrossCountry services. The hourly departures from Edinburgh (at the :04 or :05) consistently have upgrades available, except for the daily 0820 Aberdeen - Plymouth, or the 13:05 Edinburgh to Plymouth/Cardiff, when there are upgrades only available on the occasional day (regardless of how far in advance you look). Does anyone know of a good reason why this might be the case?

Hard to say unless you tell us which stations you're travelling between. Are you looking at Seatfrogging the entire journeys of these trains?

 

[enginedin]

Hard to say unless you tell us which stations you're travelling between. Are you looking at Seatfrogging the entire journeys of these trains?

ah good point - I didn't know how upgrades were allocated per service (the simplest way of programming it would be N upgrades, regardless of which stations they were between, so an Aberdeen - Stonehaven upgrade would count as one of the upgrades for the whole end-end service).

Could it be that these services are expected to be busier/more popular due to them providing once a day direct service options, especially 1V60 (08:20 Aberdeen to Plymouth), therefore Cross Country may have restricted availability on these services.

also a good observation!

Anyway - I was looking to upgrade Edinburgh to Cheltenham (I'd even thought about swapping my train so that I could upgrade, given that the upgrade on almost all journeys appears never to go much above the minimum allowable bid, but availability of train-swap on the XC services also seems to be pretty non-existent)