Kent Rover becoming online only

[Rover]

I have been passed some correspondence from a user of my rail rover website from the customer relations department of Southeastern.

It states (my bold):

"These tickets (Kent Rover) are currently still available, however they are due to be withdrawn from the 1 March 2026 from ticket offices. They will still be available to purchase from our website. Please note, these tickets will have to be posted out, so something to buy ahead of time."

The tickets are currently £60 adult, and according to BR Fares, will remain £60 from the 1st of March.
The cost of postage though is a whopping £9.45! This will be a 15.75% increase.

Correction: The 1st class mail option is £2.20 (thanks @bcarmicle)

 

[bcarmicle]

The cost of postage though is a whopping £9.45! This will be a 15.75% increase.

The 1st class mail option is £2.20. £9.45 is Special Delivery

 

[mikeg]

Utterly bonkers if they’re not going to enable e ticket fulfilment. It’s almost as if they don’t want people to use this ticket.

 

[Farigiraf]

While this is certainly a step in the wrong direction (IMO it should be available to purchase from ticket machines by now) it at least fixes the problem of Southeastern's website being unable to actually sell the Kent Rover. In the past when I've tried selecting the ticket on their website, when pressing the checkout button it defaulted to the ALR due to some bug.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Utterly bonkers if they’re not going to enable e ticket fulfilment. It’s almost as if they don’t want people to use this ticket.

Is there a reason they might indeed not, a bit like the Southern Daysave (but nowhere near as good value)? Does it undercut some other fares during its validity?

 

[MikeWM]

A strange and negative move What's the point of doing this? I've done a few of these in my time but probably won't do so again if I can't just get one from a ticket office or TVM.

Hopefully this isn't a general indication of direction from the newly (well, relatively newly in this case) 'nationalised' English railway operators.

Is there a reason they might indeed not, a bit like the Southern Daysave (but nowhere near as good value)? Does it undercut some other fares during its validity?

Just had a quick look and I can't easily find any return fares in the area that are close to £60. Highest I found was Gravesend to Dover at £48.20.

 

[Kite159]

A case of them wanting to limit the options so in a couple of years time they can quietly drop it all together saying there is "no demand".

It will be interesting to see come Sunday if the option for the Kent Rover remains within ticket offices/guard's ticketing machines outside South Eastern, or are they going to change the ticket within the database to effectively suppress it from other retail outlets (similar to the Southern Daysave)

 

[Bletchleyite]

A case of them wanting to limit the options so in a couple of years time they can quietly drop it all together saying there is "no demand".

That hasn't happened with the Southern DaySave despite it being a bit hard to buy at times. That is priced much lower, though, so does undercut a fair few fares.

 

[Farigiraf]

Just had a quick look and I can't easily find any return fares in the area that are close to £60. Highest I found was Gravesend to Dover at £48.20.

That hasn't happened with the Southern DaySave despite it being a bit hard to buy at times. That is priced much lower, though, so does undercut a fair few fares.

The Kent Rover is valid for 3 days though, so about £20 a day, which does undercut quite a few fares. It'll be cheaper than quite a few Anytime Returns so may be used for long weekends (admittedly much less than it would be if it was valid to London).

While binning it would almost certainly be permanent, and therefore I'd oppose that, it's got quite a few flaws at the moment. The first being that it's not valid to London (and you can't get boundary fares to Swanley so that's another £20-30 minimum on top of the £60 if starting anywhere else than Kent) and the second that it's for consecutive days not 3 in 7. Plus the recent price increase of course!

Putting my optimist hat on (a very foolish move these days), Southeastern could be looking at rebranding the rover to make it more useful, during which they temporarily remove it from ticket offices, after which it'll come back with plenty of fanfare and publicity. No chance, unfortunately

 

[stadler]

What a ridiculous decusion. So they are making it harder to buy and excluding people without bank accounts and without internet access. What an awful decision. I see no reason why they have to do this. The only thing i can think of is to make it harder to buy to discourage people from buying one. Maybe they have been loosing money to people buying the Kent Rover ticket. Especially as buying two of the Kent Rover tickets can work out cheaper than a weekly season ticket for many Southeastern journeys.

What i do not understand is why it has to be posted. It makes me wonder if Southeastern are switching to it being on some kind of scratchcard ticket or stamp it yourself ticket (just like the tourist information centre issued Southern Daysave tickets) rather than a CCST ticket. Southern Daysave is only sold online (plus at three council run Lewes and Seaford and Eastbourne tourist information centres) but they still allow you to collect it from a TVM if you buy online. It is odd that Southeastern will not allow buying online and picking up at a TVM with a code.

London Overground TVMs have sold the Kent Rover since 2012 which has always been a very handy way to purchase this ticket. They are the only TVMs to sell them. The message only says ticket offices but i presume this announcement means that the London Overground TVMs will stop selling them too. You can also buy a Kent Rover from the guard and it is not clear if this purchase option is being removed too. But it sounds likely that both the guard purchase option and London Overground TVMs purchase option will dissapear if the ticket offices stop selling them.

It is also worth mentioning that the Kent Rover ticket has had a massive extortionate fare increase from £45.00 to £60.00 just last year. An extortionate £15.00 fare increase all in one go. It really seems like Southeastern are trying everything to discourage people from buying this ticket.

 

[TUC]

This makes no sense on a business level. It eliminates any chance of sales from spontaneous decisions to travel. Even worse, why post and not e-ticket? Do Southeastern think this is the 1980s?

 

[yorksrob]

I think that this removal of products from ticket offices should be clamped down upon, hard.

Infact, I'd make it illegal not to have ticketing products available at ticket offices.

 

[MikeWh]

I did once make use of this ticket, but it has several flaws in my opinion. The major one for me is the gap between Dartford and Gravesend. You can get to Swanley, so why not Dartford? Another issue is the unavailability on Thameslink services in Kent. This rules out half the services between Gravesend and Rainham. And as has been mentioned, the 3 consecutive days is a bit inflexible.

The recent price hike was draconian too. It might have been justifiable if they'd made it the whole of Kent including HS1 to Ebbsfleet and Thameslink to Rainham and Sevenoaks.

 

[MikeWM]

The Kent Rover is valid for 3 days though, so about £20 a day, which does undercut quite a few fares. It'll be cheaper than quite a few Anytime Returns so may be used for long weekends (admittedly much less than it would be if it was valid to London).

I can't find any Anytime tickets that it undercuts either, though I haven't done an exhaustive search. But given the time restrictions on the Rover, it seems off-peak tickets are the better example. (A 4-in-8 NW Rover is cheaper than the anytime return Liverpool-Dumfries, for example, but is more expensive than the off-peak - there's loads of similar examples).

I agree there are flaws with the Kent Rover and a slightly expanded area would make it rather more attractive, but it is still something I've got good use from on a number of occasions in the past.

The relative value compared to other Rovers is probably a bit skewed in perception for those of us who don't qualify for any Railcards bar the Network Railcard, as the Kent is one of just two Rovers that we can get a Railcard discount on. (The other being the Thames Rover. You can add Anglia Plus if you consider a Gold Card a Railcard that anyone can buy, but then that really is all).

 

[Trainlog]

I did once make use of this ticket, but it has several flaws in my opinion. The major one for me is the gap between Dartford and Gravesend. You can get to Swanley, so why not Dartford? Another issue is the unavailability on Thameslink services in Kent. This rules out half the services between Gravesend and Rainham. And as has been mentioned, the 3 consecutive days is a bit inflexible.

The recent price hike was draconian too. It might have been justifiable if they'd made it the whole of Kent including HS1 to Ebbsfleet and Thameslink to Rainham and Sevenoaks.

Personally, I wish that they could make a 1-day and 2-day Southeastern Network rover available on weekends only, including the Marshlink and Sevenoaks Thameslink infills. It wouldn't affect weekday commuter fares, and if TOCs like Southeastern want to focus more on leisure travel, this is a good opportunity to do so.

But yes, the price hike makes it a much worse value for a ticket, and unlike other UK rovers such as GWR's Devon and Cornwall rovers, the fact that it's strict about Southeastern-only travel isn't great.

Rovers/Ranger tickets are incredibly underpromoted in the UK with the exceptions being Metro tickets or London Travelcards. Meanwhile, in stark contrast, not a month goes by that we don't hear about another promotion of Interrail from a newspaper travelsection or an ad on YouTube about it. I would certainly like to do an Interrail ticket at somepoint, and I can only admire their advertising campaign success, but it would definitely be unfortunate if we end up losing more UK Ranger/Rover tickets due to underpromotion.

 

[Adam Williams]

Postal fulfilment is really a joke in 2026, and making it online-only before sorting that out is astonishing, really.

And no, contrary to popular belief it doesn't need to be sTicket. E-Ticket would work just fine provided staff actually scan tickets.

 

[davp]

I used one last year. I agree that it's not the best product especially if at any point you are trying to get into London. I ended up buying additional tickets for Thameslink trains in Medway, but I was visiting a number of the coastal towns from a base in Ashford so it worked out saving money. A conductor said he hadn't seen one for years and the ticket office at Ashford had to look it up.

Southeastern paid out £7.50 for a 15 minute delay.

 

[Alex365Dash]

What i do not understand is why it has to be posted. It makes me wonder if Southeastern are switching to it being on some kind of scratchcard ticket or stamp it yourself ticket (just like the tourist information centre issued Southern Daysave tickets) rather than a CCST ticket. Southern Daysave is only sold online (plus at three council run Lewes and Seaford and Eastbourne tourist information centres) but they still allow you to collect it from a TVM if you buy online. It is odd that Southeastern will not allow buying online and picking up at a TVM with a code.

To my understanding, rovers/rangers can’t be fulfilled via ToD so therefore can’t be collected from a TVM. Southern use a bodge to fulfil via ToD by putting it down as a regular fare instead of a ranger in the fares data.

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

Southern use a bodge to fulfil via ToD by putting it down as a regular fare instead of a ranger in the fares data.

I think the bodge is having different data for both, along with having to add yet more data to handle flexi seasons (not too far from a ranger/rover) and carnets (RIP) vs. group fares because the original fare data hasn't been allowed to change since 1066. As much as possible everything should be sold everywhere by everyone

 

[Adam Williams]

because the original fare data hasn't been allowed to change since 1066

It's okay, I'm sure there won't be yet more product types added that cannot be represented in the schema... Oh, wait

 

[redreni]

Maybe the mere fact it undercuts some Anytime Returns is sufficient to have it increased in price, given the rumblings we're hearing that off-peaks are for the chop?

If break of journey is banned for everything except Anytimes, Rangers and Rovers, then Rangers and Rovers might become a more attractive option for some use cases. And we can't have that.

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

It's okay, I'm sure there won't be yet more product types added that cannot be represented in the schema... Oh, wait

Fun and games on the horizon for sure

 

[Rover]

If anyone is still able to purchase these tickets from a ticket office can you post your experience please?
Thanks

 

[MikeWM]

*Not* available at the LNER ticket machines at Kings Cross yesterday, though lots of other Rovers and Rangers were. I can't say either way if they were available on these machines pre-March 1st however.

 

[stadler]

Has anyone checked whether they have been removed from the TVMs at London Overground stations yet. I presume that they probably have but it would be good to get confirmation. That was always a very useful option for buying a Kent Rover ticket.

 

[davp]

I'm somewhat curious as to how popular this ticket is, especially for purchases from London Overground stations. It is available from https://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/ways-to-save/kent-rover - the grammar is dodgy but I read it as saying they are available at SouthEastern ticket offices. If it doesn't mean that then I can't think of what it could be that would make sense. There is at least one error in the purchasing interface. Children can be added for £5 each according to the link but when you try and do that they are actually added at £30 each.

 

[mickey]

It’s punctuated incredibly poorly, but the website definitely says they can be purchased at SE ticket offices. If it does ever go to online-only, they should really include any mandatory postage fees in the sale price.

 

[riceuten]

Given we (and I am sure many others) get Royal Mail post once a week, if that, "postal only" options are increasingly untenable.

 

[323235]

If you buy one and get it posted but it doesn’t arrive until after the validity date(s) I imagine it will be very difficult to get a refund after the refund changes take place.

 

[Auwooweewoo]

BEWARE! I attempted to buy this ticket online but received an error message after the card details stage. After having tried again and receiving the same message I checked my email and I had apparently successfully bought the ticket twice. The error message was faultily applied and as such deceptive. Is this a consistent problem with the Southeastern website?