Rail Miles

[jagardner1984]

A quick thought based on a series of adverts I’ve heard on radio for Amex and their British Airways tie in with Avios.

The gist being - day to day personal / business spending equals discounted / free leisure travel later

Is anyone aware of a similar scheme for rail ? Obviously there have been various ways you could earn nectar points for example on ticket purchases, but a direct tie in with effectively discounting excess capacity by selling for reduced numbers of “Rail Miles” - but also a loyalty scheme to incentivise further travel, bonus miles for 1st Class, Sleeper, onboard catering etc use ?

If it doesn’t exist - aren’t there perfect parallels with attracting exactly the kind of customer presumably Avios is targeted at ?

I am sure there are a lot of reasons why not, but a bit of Googling doesn’t give me any results, so intrigued if anyone is aware of any, past or present. Seems an obvious, cheap and easy win for RDG if not.

 

[Watershed]

A quick thought based on a series of adverts I’ve heard on radio for Amex and their British Airways tie in with Avios.

The gist being - day to day personal / business spending equals discounted / free leisure travel later

Is anyone aware of a similar scheme for rail ? Obviously there have been various ways you could earn nectar points for example on ticket purchases, but a direct tie in with effectively discounting excess capacity by selling for reduced numbers of “Rail Miles” - but also a loyalty scheme to incentivise further travel, bonus miles for 1st Class, Sleeper, onboard catering etc use ?

If it doesn’t exist - aren’t there perfect parallels with attracting exactly the kind of customer presumably Avios is targeted at ?

I am sure there are a lot of reasons why not, but a bit of Googling doesn’t give me any results, so intrigued if anyone is aware of any, past or present. Seems an obvious, cheap and easy win for RDG if not.

Obvious, yes. Easy, not exactly. Cheap, definitely not! The fact that rail costs are borne by the DfT but revenues go to the Treasury means that this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The fact that it might generate more revenue than it costs is seemingly irrelevant; despite the noises being made about GBR and the like, all that matters in today's crazy setup is cost.

 

[jagardner1984]

Well if you hook into an existing reward scheme nectar and Avios are two that spring to mind - presumably somewhere in the NR back end there is a way of calculating miles travelled between any two stations ? Add a multiplier for 1st ?

Then at the other end the rewards you are “gifting” are essentially unused capacity (BA for example tier the cost of flights paid in Avios by the cost per ticket) - ie essentially 1000 “miles” or points equals a voucher for £10, or whatever. Presumably akin to the “claim missing avios” - you could add a mechanism for entering a ticket number or scanning a ticket to add the miles on to your account ?

It doesn’t seem entirely daft or unfeasible to me ? But perhaps the DfT would prefer me to stick to the planes who seem rather more bothered about travellers coming back to them.

 

[pwharley]

I am sure there are a lot of reasons why not, but a bit of Googling doesn’t give me any results, so intrigued if anyone is aware of any, past or present. Seems an obvious, cheap and easy win for RDG if not.

InterCity had a "Frequent Traveller Club" back in the 1980s.
I still have the plastic membership card somewhere, which one presented at the ticket office when purchasing tickets.
I can't remember what the rewards were - can anyone chip in?

 

[fandroid]

Some online ticket sellers offered Nectar points, GWR for instance, but that stopped once all the income shifted to the Treasury. It worked for GWR, as I preferentially used their website/app in spite of it crashing and being unavailable an annoying amount of the time

 

[IanXC]

Deutsche Bahn in Germany have such a scheme called "Bahn Bonus", including the ability to exchange points to/from other hotel/airline schemes.