Lower Advance Fares Hidden

[ashworth]

Sorry for the long details but I thought some people may be interested.

I am going away for a few days at Easter and have been trying to book some cheaper AP tickets to and from Mansfield/Nottingham to Croydon.
I'm travelling down on Easter Sunday and so I knew from past years that it could be difficult being during a busy holiday weekend and also with engineering work. I'm travelling back on the following Saturday and so that is not a problem.

On first appearance looking at both the EMT and East Coast Websites there appears to be no AP fares availble to St. Pancras and only one cheap journey available late on the Sunday evening from Nottingham to Kings Cross via Grantham. It was looking like having to buy an Off Peak Return on the day for just over £50 because as there appears to be no through trains from Nottingham to St Pancras that day, with a limited service changing at Leicester, there probably would never be any Nottingham to St Pancras AP tickets and certainly no Mansfield to Croydon tickets made available, even if I waited a few weeks.

I tried to get more journeys available to Kings Cross by entering via Grantham and via Peterborough but nothing was available. As a last resort I tried entering via Bingham (local station between Nottingham and Grantham) and this revealed a number of Nottingham to Kings Cross journeys at only £10.25.
I will just need to pay from Mansfield to Nottingham (bus fare as train doesn't connect) and use my Oyster Card from London to Croydon.

Prices of AP tickets for the return journey were also interesting when through tickets from Croydon Stations to both Nottingham and Mansfield are readily available.
The interesting point is that the cheapest AP fare from Croydon to Nottingham is £14 but to Mansfield (additional connection from Nottingham)the cheapest fare is only £13. However, to get the £13 fare to Mansfield you do have to enter West Croydon otherwise the cheapest fare given is £16. The tickets when they arrive always say EMT with connections and are for Croydon Stations and so any train from East or West Croydon can be used to London.
Yes I know that I could have got for £1 less through the EMT website but I booked both journeys together with East Coast and I did get the 10% East Coast discount for the outward journey.

By spending some time playing around on the websites quite a considerable amount can be saved by finding AP fares that are deeply hidden in the system that would otherwise not come to the surface.

 

[142094]

That's the thing, TOCs know some people may be in a rush to find tickets, and others wouldn't know how to, so they get more money for more expensive tickets. What a world we live in!

 

[Failed Unit]

That's the thing, TOCs know some people may be in a rush to find tickets, and others wouldn't know how to, so they get more money for more expensive tickets. What a world we live in!

Or just think rail is too expensive and drive / fly instead!

 

[142094]

Exactly, hardly a good advert for the railways. Hopefully Adonis will be trying out his new thoughts about simpler tickets on East Coast, a la Grand Central. Whilst I think it is a good idea for a lot of people on the railways (especially those who cannot or do not know how to get the cheaper tickets), it will be a bit of a PITA if he decides to get rid of advance tickets and other promotions.

 

[Broken Viking]

I wonder if this might be similar to what I recently experienced when trying to book VDS/VES fares on Virgin for a journey in April...Even though I'd been "queueing" on the website for a number of days before tickets were released, I didn't actually see the Advance fares when they were released (By the sounds of things, my queries might've triggered some form of flow restriction on my IP address) and I missed them.

That said though, someone else also commented that VDS/VES fares have been impossible to get hold of ever since the VHF timetable came into effect. My own investigations certainly seem to correlate this.

Admittedly, I thought that I'd managed to find a cheap return on Avantix, but Yorkie pointed out that what I was looking at was actually a kind of saver return-esque portion only valid for one journey alongside an Advance seat.

Looks like my journey's going to be another £50,- ching for me this time around...And all because the rules for Advance fares only allow them to be booked c. 90 days (Variable) from date of travel.

 

[ashworth]

There almost certainly are lots of the lower priced AP tickets for many journeys that are never sold because for various reasons why these never appear for sale on the various websites.
It may be because faster journeys are available which are shown instead. It could be because there are long waits for connections which results in the journey time being considerably longer than by journeys with shorter connection times. Although some websites allow you to enter slower routes these still do not always allow for all of these factors. The computer generated journeys from the various websites always give the fastest timings even, if this makes sense, the fastest timing by a slower route.
My journey from Nottingham to London, which has a 58 minute wait for a connection at Grantham, only appeared by entering via Bingham, as there are no quicker journeys that call at Bingham.
Last summer I was desperately trying to obtain cheap £7 AP tickets from Mansfield to Blackpool North. I tried via Nottingham, via Worksop, via Manchester, via Crewe, via Stoke on Trent, via Leeds, via Halifax and even via Congleton but nothing cheap would come up. It was only when I entered avoid Manchester that I got the ticket by a very strange route Mansfield-Nottingham, Nottingham-Stockport, Stockport-Crewe, Crewe-Preston, Preston-Blackpool. This route provided the shortest timings avoiding Manchester and the £7 tickets were available.

You have to know how to work the system, be prepared for a longer route, sometimes with many changes of train and long waits, if you are to take advantage of some of the very cheap AP fares available. But as I have already stated they are well hidden and difficult to make the computers come up with them.