Price Alerts for UK Rail Tickets

[bspahh]

Is there a WWW site which will let me enter details of a UK railway journey and send me an email when tickets become available for a given price? It could give me a link to buy the tickets and get some click through revenue.

It could also send me suggestions for trips from my home station with a given budget to somewhere with a beach, events or places to visit.

https://www.kayak.co.uk/ has "Price Alerts" for flights and hotels. https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/ has price alerts for stuff at Amazon.

 

[Starmill]

Is there a WWW site which will let me enter details of a UK railway journey and email when tickets become available for a given price? It could give me a link to buy the tickets and get some click through revenue.

It could also send me suggestions for trips from my home station with a given budget to somewhere with a beach, events or places to visit.

https://www.kayak.co.uk/ has "Price Alerts" for flights and hotels. https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/ has price alerts for stuff at Amazon.

https://www.thetrainline.com/ticketalert trainline will sort of do it for you for free. In addition the specific operator you're travelling with may also do it e.g. LNER, although that may work only in respect of their own services. There are probably a handful of other examples.

It probably won't be very effective if you're not looking beyond the current booking availability. It probably cannot detect a drop in the price after advance tickets first become available. That's reasonably uncommon though.

 

[bspahh]

https://www.thetrainline.com/ticketalert trainline will sort of do it for you for free. In addition the specific operator you're travelling with may also do it e.g. LNER, although that may work only in respect of their own services. There are probably a handful of other examples.

Thanks. It looks like https://www.thetrainline.com/ticketalert will send an alert when tickets on a specific date become available. That is good for when you are going to a specific event.

I was thinking more of something where you would pick an itinerary on a Saturday, Sunday or week day, have it show you the prices of the Advance tickets that are listed in the fares database, as at brfares.com and then send you an email when tickets at a given price become available. This would be good for leisure journeys, when I don't particularly care where I go, but I'd like an interesting trip at a good price.

 

[Haywain]

https://www.thetrainline.com/ticketalert trainline will sort of do it for you for free. In addition the specific operator you're travelling with may also do it e.g. LNER, although that may work only in respect of their own services. There are probably a handful of other examples.

It probably won't be very effective if you're not looking beyond the current booking availability. It probably cannot detect a drop in the price after advance tickets first become available. That's reasonably uncommon though.

They won’t do it for a specific price point though, just when tickets are released.

 

[Starmill]

They won’t do it for a specific price point though, just when tickets are released.

Yes. I'm not aware of anything that works in a more advanced way. Trainline also has "price prediction" in its app, but all it usually does is estimate the number of days before the next price increase on the ticket you're currently looking for, which does not sound especially useful to @bspahh.

 

[miklcct]

I was thinking more of something where you would pick an itinerary on a Saturday, Sunday or week day, have it show you the prices of the Advance tickets that are listed in the fares database, as at brfares.com and then send you an email when tickets at a given price become available. This would be good for leisure journeys, when I don't particularly care where I go, but I'd like an interesting trip at a good price.

This is not a particularly useful use case.

The main useful use case is to set an alert in a time range on a date for a specific journey (e.g. 2022-08-07 from St Pancras to Luton Airport Parkway departing between 08:00 to 10:00), and receive email when a particular price point becomes available.

I have a few such alerts set on Google Flights, having a fixed itinerary and subscribing price changes. The reason is that I want to go to a specific place at a specific time, but the price is putting me off.