Counted place allocation on Greater Anglia with Off Peak Day Return

[JBuchananGB]

On Monday I travelled from Wigan NW to Billericay and back using tickets purchased using the Forum's web site. The ticketing was split between advance singles on the Avanti trains between Wigan and London with one CCST for each ticket, including the seat Reservation, and an Off-Peak Day Return from London Zones 1/2 to Billericay, four vouchers, two outbound (ticket and counted place reservation), and two return (ticket and counted place reservation)
Clearly the Off-Peak Day Return was valid on any suitable trains, so what was the point of issuing counted place reservations?

 

[Flying Snail]

There is no point to them for anything other than tying advance tickets to specific trains.

It is a very stupid way of doing this that only happens on in Britain where the use of departure times and seat reservations are used to assign tickets to specific trains rather than public train numbers used in most other countries.

 

[yorkie]

I think it's down to the ticket issuing machine (TIS) / ticket vending machine (TVM), but yes, there is no point in them.

There should be a 'sanity check' along the lines of checking if the ticket isn't a fixed / advance ticket type, then don't issue the coupon.

Such coupons do need to be issued in conjunction with fixed / advance tickets, of course.

 

[JBuchananGB]

Thanks for your responses. Tickets were collected from a Merseyrail ticket office. On the outward journey I caught a different train to that on the itinerary, but on the return I was on the appointed service. Both off-peak trains were almost deserted.

 

[Flying Snail]

I think it's down to the ticket issuing machine (TIS) / ticket vending machine (TVM), but yes, there is no point in them.

There should be a 'sanity check' along the lines of checking if the ticket isn't a fixed / advance ticket type, then don't issue the coupon.

Such coupons do need to be issued in conjunction with fixed / advance tickets, of course.

I wonder if the issuing of these counted place reservations with walk-up tickets or standalone reservation requests (GWR website happily issues them) reduces the Advance quotas for those trains?

 

[yorkie]

I wonder if the issuing of these counted place reservations with walk-up tickets or standalone reservation requests (GWR website happily issues them) reduces the Advance quotas for those trains?

Good question, but not to worry; it doesn't affect Advance quotas.

 

[MrJeeves]

We have an internal ticket raised from a while ago to discard reservations on flexible tickets if all the reservations we got back were counted place ones, which would alleviate this issue.

As I understand, it would be harder to keep some reservations while discarding the counted place reservations on the same ticket though, so you couldn't (as an example) discard the Greater Anglia counted place reservations while keeping GWR ones if they both formed part of one overall journey. Maybe this is different with the changes being made to the reservations system, though.

 

[Sleepy]

I wonder if the issuing of these counted place reservations with walk-up tickets or standalone reservation requests (GWR website happily issues them) reduces the Advance quotas for those trains?

On GWR if the full amount of seats or counted places are booked against walk up fares the Advance tickets will still show as available from the quota but the system will be unable to complete the transaction as you click through the process.