National rail enquiries ticketing - no booking fee
Trainline.com - 75p booking fee.
How does trainline.com stay in business? Or, why don't NRE have a booking fee? Or even am I getting something from Trainline that I can't from NRE, eg offers?
This is nothing to do with postage or a credit card fee, it's just to simply go through the motions of booking online.
Bizarre?? Have I missed something??
This comes up time and time again on this forum (this thread might get closed as a quick search will return you loads of posts, but here's a quick lowdown).
First of all, National Rail Enquiries don't actually book tickets for you. They will redirect you to one of the train companies depending on the journey you have booked.
To book tickets, all booking engines will be charged a certain amount. Whether they pass some/all of that on to you (the customer) is up to them. Trainline's primary business is selling tickets, so they decided to pass a charge on to the customer as they aren't getting money from elsewhere. This also applies to RailEasy and Red Spotted Hanky.
You can buy tickets from train operators instead and most (if not all) of them don't charge booking fees, they absorb the cost instead. Some of them also offer additional perks for purchasing from them, including rewards schemes or promotional discounts. It is worth mentioning that all train operators selling tickets are required to make all tickets available for purchase, regardless of operator. For example, you can buy tickets for SouthEastern Railway from the Virgin Trains website, etc.
As for how Trainline are in business, there's a variety of reasons.
First off is that they put a lot of money (presumably made through the booking fee) into advertising. They had TV and online adverts, etc and it became a well known brand. Heck, I knew about and used Trainline well before I knew the train operators had sites that did the same.
Another reason is that people
think that if they want a journey on one operator, they have to buy from that operator's site, while Trainline sell tickets for all operators. On a similar note, some people hate their train company to the point where they don't mind paying a booking fee if they think the train company they would've bought a ticket off will get less of their money (I know someone who does this).
I feel it's mostly down to brand awareness and public knowledge.
EDIT: I found out about train operators having their own sites selling tickets through the information displays on LondonMidland services when I was commuting between Crewe and Wolverhampton a few years ago. They had an emphasis on "no booking fees" (possibly with more than one exclamation mark!!!)
