Compulsory reservations - ticketing

[Bletchleyite]

Please note, this thread is not intended for the discussion of the merits or otherwise of compulsory reservation "InterCity" services. The existing thread remains to discuss that here:

Modern Railways: LNER and compulsory reservations

There is an article in MR this month in which David Horne as good as says that LNER is likely to keep compulsory reservations permanently. It doesn’t quite say it directly, but rather something like “compulsory reservations will be a part of LNER’s future”, and also alludes to a possibility of...

www.railforums.co.uk

Obviously ticketing and compulsory reservations are two slightly separate but related concepts. You can, as LNER presently do, have compulsory reservations with the existing ticketing system and reservations either included with Advances or obtained separately.

However, I have a few thoughts on this and would be interested in other input:

• Single-fare pricing as per low cost airlines would seem essential.
• The simplest option is that you have "global fares", i.e. airline style you buy a ticket including a reservation and change it if you need to, either for a fee or just fare difference. That means no validity arguments - you either have a ticket for that service or you don't.
• Through ticketing is an interesting point. I'm not sure it wouldn't work as well to have multiple fares issued on a single ticket, as LNER seem to be trialling, so to stop pricing things as through fares but rather just aggregate the individual fares. When purchasing, the platform would simply aggregate the price of the legs of the journey together, and you could do things like have First Class on one but not the other, or cancel/refund parts of it rather than all of it.
• We would need a clear rule that any contiguous (which would include cross-town) combination of tickets/fares is still a through ticket for purposes of being assisted in case of disruption.

Any more thoughts?

 

[yorksrob]

I just like the idea that for a relatively long journey such as Crewe - London, you always have the option of rocking up and getting a cheap walk-on fare, albeit through taking the slow train.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I just like the idea that for a relatively long journey such as Crewe - London, you always have the option of rocking up and getting a cheap walk-on fare, albeit through taking the slow train.

The other compulsory reservations thread is about that - I created two - one about where local services would need to be improved to replace local journeys on ICs, and one about how the ticketing might work.