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Avanti charging amendment fees on excesses.

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blimmo

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Tried Rugby on Friday. I was initially told that is was not possible because I bought the ticket online, then after a second try a different member of staff was called over who said it was only possible to excess both directions. At least they got the price right for that so an improvement on Coventry although the response was once again not hugely friendly.

My response to the last communication from Avanti:
The NRCoT are the conditions I agreed to when I bought my ticket: they are therefore binding on both me and Avanti. I am happy to pay amendment fees that are mentioned in these conditions however I am not willing to give up the entitlements promised to me when I entered into the contract. If I had known that an amendment fee was going to be charged this could well have influenced my purchasing decision, hopefully you can see how this is not compatible with consumer rights. If Avanti wish to charge extra fees not specified in the NRCoT they must first change it; they cannot simply unilaterally decide to charge them.

The appropriate industry procedures for an excess (hopefully you have access to these to check) are:

Travelling by a different route​

...
No mention is made of any admin fee, in contrast with other sections dealing with e.g. changing Advance tickets:

Travelling on a Service Other Than Specified​

...
I would hope that Avanti did not intend to ignore these established industry procedures and breach their contractual obligations to me. If you still think this was correct I would like a deadlock letter so I can take this to the Rail Ombudsman.

Now today I have received another response:
Thank you for your email, I do appreciate it and I hope you had a weekend.

What I am going to do is escalate this upwards as far as I can to get a definite answer, for you, as well as for myself as I very well admit I may be wrong on this matter and have interpreted things incorrectly.

I do very much agree that those are the procedures in place industry wide for excessing a ticket and appreciate the fact that the NRCoT does not specify any sort of amendment fee.

If you will allow me some time while I do this and I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer.

I wish you a good week ahead and thank you for contacting Avanti West Coast.
It seems quoting the industry procedures at them has worked!
 
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Segedunum

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The earlier agent response very much screams them desperately trying to bash through as many cases as possible and making things up as they go. Unfortunately, every reply you give forces the case out of the resolved queue and back into the escalated one!

It's taken them an alarmingly long time to admit they're out of their depth and need manager/TOC involvement (Avanti Customer Relations is run by First but is not fully in-house)
 

800Travel

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Glad they are now properly investigating. My favourite part of their response has to be 'I hope you had a weekend' though :lol:
 

Alex C.

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I actually really appreciate a response like this which shows some level of human engagement. It would be better if they got these things right in the first place of course.

I worked for a TOC dealing with these sort of complaints (once they had been responded to by first line agents) and unfortunately poor knowledge of the overall systems was endemic. Unfortunately it is not considered a particularly skilled job despite the huge amount of knowledge that you realistically need on ticketing, routing, the law (I needed to reference the bylaws, RoRA, CRA, GDPR, PRO and the Equality Act at various points in some level of detail), rolling stock, payment systems, internal processes, external processes. We had a pretty comprehensive 6 week training programme but if you don't have any previous knowledge or interest in the railways, it barely scratches the surface.

Edit: there is also a culture issue I often encountered around the railway always being right. I certainly encountered a number of employees (including managers) who just could not accept the fact it was possible for the customer to be right about a member of staff doing a poor job, or that a ticket sold by Trainline created a contract and an obligation on the TOC, or even staff who insisted that any off peak ticket could only ever be valid after 9:30am - and that the printed restriction codes didn't mean anything. This culture of always being right compounded the issues caused by poor knowledge.

Unfortunately as with everything these days, it's far easier (or more profitable) to churn out keyword based copy and paste responses in the hope 90% of people will give up (and in my experience, they do) than pay people to do a decent job.
 
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BurtonM

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I actually really appreciate a response like this which shows some level of human engagement.

I think it's particularly impressive that someone managed to get a CSA of any sort to admit that they might be wrong about something, that's virtually unheard of over here.
Usually if it gets to that point, they either refuse to continue the conversation, or back down/escalate without such concessions!
 

blimmo

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30 Jul 2025
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West Mids
Tried asking for the price of an excess at Bath Spa today and was pleasantly surprised to be given the correct price (for only one direction of a return even) first time! It did take rather a while but that's understandable since there's rather a lot to enter. Looks like GWR are beating Avanti on this.
 

MotCO

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I think it's particularly impressive that someone managed to get a CSA of any sort to admit that they might be wrong about something,
I think that's fair dues to them. It's not often you get someone to confess they may not have got things right.
 

blimmo

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30 Jul 2025
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Location
West Mids
Final update on the complaint to Avanti:
Thank you for your patience, I very much appreciate it.

I wanted to come back to you as I have received a response to my internal inquiry. You were correct, the excessing of the ticket should not have involved any form of additional or administrative fee and the price you thought it should have been, was the correct price and I can understand the confusion at being quoted something a lot more than that.

I myself stand corrected as I had misinterpreted the information I had and I apologise for the misunderstanding.

The relevant department has been notified of what happened and we will take additional action required, such as ticketing refreshers and additional training needed so what happened isn't repeated.

I want to thank you helping me get to the bottom of this and I hope you can be rest assured that your instincts were correct.

I hope this email finds you well and I wish you a pleasant evening.
Hopefully it will be possible to get excesses at Coventry ticket office now. I doubt it, but the CSA responding to my complaint has really done all he can which I appreciate.
 

MotCO

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Final update on the complaint to Avanti:

Hopefully it will be possible to get excesses at Coventry ticket office now. I doubt it, but the CSA responding to my complaint has really done all he can which I appreciate.
A refreshingly honest response.
 

Hadders

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That’s a good response from Avanti, much better to be honest about the situation.
 
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