East Coast booking ATW+TPE

[Grizzly]

Hello all,
bit of a technical one for my 1st post: when trying to book an Advance between Leeds and Swansea on the East Coast website (for the rewards points) I can't see any of the through fares on TPE+ATW, which are available elsewhere, as are the ATW only e.g. Manchester-Swansea.

Can anyone suggest why this might be and does anyone have any tips to get these fares to appear please?

thanks

 

[Oscar]

Perhaps these services leave earlier and arrive later than those via Birmingham and are therefore repressed. Try adding "Via Manchester".

 

[Grizzly]

Thanks Oscar, I don't think that's it though. The via Manchester trains are there, but only an anytime single fare. Curiously the advance tickets do appear in redspottedhanky, which seems to have the same interface as EC

 

[YorkshireRider]

A bit of a strange one, try and see if they come by going via Bradford or Halifax. If they did i wonder if you could still travel on TPE given you cant get a reservation on Northern as i guess the ticket would be ATW and connections?? No idea why the EC site will not bring them up though if you have found them on other sites

 

[John @ home]

when trying to book an Advance between Leeds and Swansea on the East Coast website (for the rewards points) I can't see any of the through fares on TPE+ATW

My guess is that this is due to the way in which East Coast's software providers have patched a faulty booking engine.

Earlier this year, it was reported that some WebTIS booking engines were allowing journeys by perverse routes. A number of attempts to correct this were made, most of which made matters worse. It was then reported that East Coast had imposed an artificial limit on the length of a journey. I don't know whether this limits a journey to a certain number of miles more than the shortest route, or to a certain percentage more, but it does have the effect of excluding many tens of thousands of Permitted Routes.

The Leeds - Swansea Advance tickets, which have "ATW FGW NT & TPE" in the routeing field, are particularly likely to be hit by this artificial limit. The shortest Leeds - Swansea route (via Denton, Wem and Llandeilo) is 219 miles. But this route has only one train a week, and that's in the wrong direction! The usual route for "ATW FGW NT & TPE" Advance tickets (via Gorton, Earlestown, Frodsham and Newport) is 277 miles. I think it's the additional 58 miles (or 26%) which may be causing the problem.

While this error remains, the East Coast site will continue to lose our custom.

 

[Grizzly]

Thanks all for the quick replies.

It does seem as if the problem is as described by John@home, as it is specific to East Coast, but it's only minor while you can book elsewhere.

You can get Advance tickets by putting in via Hebden Bridge (though not on East Coast's website) without reservations between Leeds and Manchester. From what I understand though, you couldn't use these on TPE without a seat reservation for a specific service.

One note to anyone else looking at similar journeys: you can often get cheaper Advance prices by splitting into separate tickets at Manchester - something to do with when ATW and TPE release their Advance quotas I suspect.