LNER app / website overcharging for advance tickets

[Starmill]

For an immediate departure from Chester to Warrington Bank Quay LNER quotes £7.60 on the 1836.







Every other service I can see such as Trainsplit and Trainline is offering the same thing at £5.90:

 

[158757]

£5.90 on the northern app. Must be the "new, dynamic shake up" of rail fares by LNER

 

[FaresGuru22]

Why not just contact them to highlight the discrepancy? Something like this would be a technical error for any retailer.

Fares data unfortunately doesn't just flow through every retailer, there are usually intermediate buttons that need to be pressed. And there are always things that can go wrong.

Just tell them, let them fix it. No retailer will be intentionally 'overcharging'.

Just checked BRfares, these were fairly recently introduced fares - I expect they just need to press some buttons!

 

[OscarH]

Why not just contact them to highlight the discrepancy? Something like this would be a technical error for any retailer.

Fares data unfortunately doesn't just flow through every retailer, there are usually intermediate buttons that need to be pressed. And there are always things that can go wrong.

Just tell them, let them fix it. No retailer will be intentionally 'overcharging'.

Just checked BRfares, these were fairly recently introduced fares - I expect they just need to press some buttons!

It would be easy for it to just flow through to the retailers without this whitelisting nonsense if there was some kind of validation so less garbage kept ending up in it

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 15 Sep 2024 ==

That said, I'm not necessary convinced this is whitelisting, unless just that tier is new. It's also very possible that it's an availability caching issue, as is seen on pretty much ever retailer fairly often - while retailers can mitigate it a bit, the caching is necessary due to national system limitations, so this can be inevitable

 

[Starmill]

It would be easy for it to just flow through to the retailers without this whitelisting nonsense if there was some kind of validation so less garbage kept ending up in it

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 15 Sep 2024 ==

That said, I'm not necessary convinced this is whitelisting, unless just that tier is new. It's also very possible that it's an availability caching issue, as is seen on pretty much ever retailer fairly often - while retailers can mitigate it a bit, the caching is necessary due to national system limitations, so this can be inevitable

I believe the person making the journey has booked the ticket on trainsplit, and used their ticket, at my advice, and contacted LNER by Twitter. If a cache issue were the culprit I'd expect the trainsplit payment would have failed.

 

[yorkie]

There are many occasions when the forum's site undercuts LNER's. It is difficult to define "intentional overcharging", so it's best not to go down that road, but I think it's safe to say that LNER have very different priorities to ours (i.e. maximising revenue vs providing advanced options and high quality customer service)

As for letting the relevant people know, in my experience customer services don't always direct feedback to the right people; posting on this forum is the most effective way to alert the relevant people

 

[OscarH]

If a cache issue were the culprit I'd expect the trainsplit payment would have failed.

Yes and no. Most commonly the cache is wrong that way yeah and add-to-basket will fail, but you can get the other way around on occasion too - the cache has got the lower tiers marked unavailable and they've become available again (refunds typically, though could be the TOC doing strange things).

 

[Starmill]

Yes and no. Most commonly the cache is wrong that way yeah and add-to-basket will fail, but you can get the other way around on occasion too - the cache has got the lower tiers marked unavailable and they've become available again (refunds typically, though could be the TOC doing strange things).

Good point.

Whether it was a bug in cache or a product type not set up correctly, it would appear LNER fixed this very quickly indeed after this thread was posted, as the problem hasn't been found again by the person who makes the journey.

Of course, it could well be just coincidence. But they're grateful either way.