Should "travel with confidence" fares measures become permanent?

[Bletchleyite]

I wonder how much these "friendlier" policies (i.e. refundable Advances to a voucher, no admin fee) actually cost the railway?

Could they actually increase Advance use (which the railway likes) if they were kept permanently, and thus be revenue positive? And also reduce the need for faff over stuff like excesses if you can just refund and reissue instead?

 

[Kilopylae]

Refunding Advances certainly does make people more confident to book them; waiving the admin fee for date changes is probably revenue-negative, though (naturally) I'd still prefer them not to restore it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Refunding Advances certainly does make people more confident to book them; waiving the admin fee for date changes is probably revenue-negative, though (naturally) I'd still prefer them not to restore it.

The railway likes people to use Advances. No fee for a change (just the fare difference) encourages the use of Advances? And it is not like any administration is actually being done if tickets have not been printed - it's all electronic.

An Advance where you can just pull out your phone and change it there and then is a totally different game to one where you have to go to a booking office, queue up and pay an extra tenner. You can even change it on the bus to the station if you know you'll miss the train.

Of note here (to my surprise) is that Premier Inn refund the difference (actual money) if you change your hotel booking and the new one is cheaper! Impressively friendly, and actually encourages people to switch to cheaper (harder to sell) hotels/dates and free up rooms in the ones they'll sell easily.

 

[Starmill]

I suspect that they want their quid pro quo. Permitting free exchanges has meant it is less feasible to sell the cheapest tickets, which haven't come back. It does no good to charge more for a "nicer" policy if it makes you less commercially competitive. I think they would prefer to just improve pricing, much of which is naturally still well above what it might have been pre-pandemic.

The real answer is that an intermediate level of ticket is conspicuously missing. One which is refundable but booked train only, but costs slightly more than the cheaper tickets.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The real answer is that an intermediate level of ticket is conspicuously missing. One which is refundable but booked train only, but costs slightly more than the cheaper tickets.

I suspect if we didn't have off peak walk-up tickets we would have something like that.

But realistically what's the problem with refundable-to-voucher for everything? If you don't have the admin fee you can just keep pushing a ticket forward if you want, which is de-facto very similar in concept. Non-refundable just makes people dissatisfied and less likely to buy Advances at all.

Advance tickets are increasingly about yield management, i.e. being able to price individual trains and journeys very granularly, and far less about getting your money actually in advance. You can see this by how quiet trains have good value ones available often on the day now. And if you look at easyJet.com for tomorrow, not everything will be £299 or more.