Flexi season tickets relatively overpriced?

[class442]

I've noticed that flexi season tickets, which give 8 days travel within 28 days are not a great deal, at least on the Northampton to Euston route I'm looking at in terms of commuting.

A anytime day return is £79.30.
A flexi season ticket is £555.10
A annual season ticket is £7352.00

£79.30 x 8 is £634.40, so getting the flexi ticket saves £79.30 over buying 8 individual anytime day returns. I thought the discount would be larger, but I guess this discount is about as generous as can be expected.

Getting the flexi ticket year round, i.e. £555.10 x 13 (as 52/4=13) would come to £7216.30, which compared to the annual season ticket looks like really bad value, as you're only saving £135.70 in exchange for only being able to travel 2 days each week on average with the flexi, rather than being able to travel flexibly 7 days a week with the annual.
Of course most people probably wouldn't get 13 flexi tickets a year due to holidays, but still the value looks bad compared to the year season ticket if you got 12 flexi's (£6661.2).

The value proposition is even worse when considering railcards for those who can use them, as the anytime day return with railcard discount is £52.80, so 8 of those would be £422.4. Railcards can't be applied to the flexi ticket, so buying individual tickets here is definitely cheaper, and the cost of even a 3 year railcard would pay for itself within 1 month.

In conclusion, I think the flexi ticket should be cheaper, as it's not much cheaper than buying day returns or a year season ticket. Is the situation much different in other parts of the country? I appreciate that part of the selling point is that it's easier to pay £555 rather than £7k upfront.

 

[Hadders]

Flexi-seasons are not great value. I seem to remember this being a Governemnt decision when they were launched, rather than a train company decision.

On my local line (Great Northern) there was historically a well used carnet ticket that allowed 5 journeys to be purchased for use within 3 months that got a 20% discount. When flexi-season tickckets were introduced the carnet tickets were scrapped with the new flexi-season ticket seeing a less generous 10% discount.

 

[Watershed]

Flexi Seasons are, for most use cases, a waste of time. The measly 12.5% discount they typically offer is nowhere near the discount that most Railcard holders can already get.

Whilst not every person can get an age or status-based Railcard, for commuters around London & the southeast (who make up the vast majority of commuters overall) there is always the option of the Network Railcard or a cheap Annual Gold Card season. This means that as a minimum, the evening return journey can be discounted.

For many commutes there are cheaper Off-Peak tickets that are valid in the evening, so when you combine these two factors it is almost never going to be worthwhile buying a Flexi Season.

For NMP-EUS, an Anytime Day Single in the morning and a Network Railcard discounted Off-Peak Day Single in the evening adds up to £68.50; the combined cost is less than the daily cost of a Flexi Season (£69.39).

The Treasury are the real reason for this stinginess; it's said that they refused to sign off on the discount being any higher for fear of cannibalising season ticket revenue. Of course, they would have had years of data from the various part-time season ticket trials run by various TOCs across the country, such as GWR in parts of Devon/Cornwall. Quite why they couldn't use this to run the figures, I do not know.

 

[swt_passenger]

On my local route to London, a 7 day season was, and still is, about the same price as 2 anytime day returns. If you only use it for work, it’s still basically a 5 for 2 deal. This isn’t unusual if you get over 90 mins or so from London, eg places like Portsmouth or Southampton.

When they came in some people seemed to expect flexi seasons for 8 days in a month, to be a small fraction of the 7 day season, and clearly that was never likely to happen.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yes, they're very poor value. For many middle distance/longer South East journeys, it's cheaper to buy a full priced single in and a Network Railcard discounted single back. That's what I do. It doesn't work everywhere, but it does in places where the minimum fare isn't a great issue, and even better in places where Oval single fare pricing has been implemented.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 12 Mar 2025 ==

When they came in some people seemed to expect flexi seasons for 8 days in a month, to be a small fraction of the 7 day season, and clearly that was never likely to happen.

The price of a 7 day season (perhaps slightly more to reflect that two of those days, Saturday and Sunday, mostly don't get used) is probably about where a 7-in-a-month flexi season should sit. If it's 8 in a month obviously a little higher to take that into account. The pricing of them at the moment renders them largely pointless other than for the convenience of not having to buy a ticket each day, though if sold as an S-ticket (awful format) it's as much faff as doing that.

 

[800Travel]

Yeah - Flexi Seasons are very badly priced IMO. I found on my route it's just cheaper to use a railcard, by some way!

Also never understand why they didn't do First Class Flexi Seasons given they have First Class Season Tickets