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Hi, I needed to refund a TrainSplit Advance ticket booking made using the wrong travel date. Accordingly, I made a booking for an identical journey on the correct date and then applied for a refund on the original booking.
The original ticket price was £110.10, but they are only refunding £85.10, less the expected £5 fee = £80.10. Why has the refund been capped at £85.10? What is the justification? Is this mentioned somewhere on their website?
My first time booking with TrainSplit and this has rather tarnished the experience.
I assume the new booking was cheaper? You don't get the extra back if it is with any retailer, that would be counter to national policy which retailers must follow. If the new booking is cheaper you will get back the value of that less the admin fee.
FAQ says (emphasis mine) "Refund: After rebooking, apply for a refund on the original booking. You'll get a refund up to the value of the original ticket, minus a £5 admin fee. If the replacement ticket is cheaper, it is that value less the admin fee that is refunded."
Looking at the original price paid, the ticket cost was £85.10 and the "Total share of saving fees" was £25, making the total price paid of £110.10. So they are not refunding me that £25.
I shall raise this with their customer support.
Thanks for the advice thus far.
Nick M.
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TBH, after this experience, I think I shall revert to my previous practice of finding the optimum split(s) using TrainSplit and then booking the individual tickets on the TfW website, and trouser the full saving!
TBH, after this experience, I think I shall revert to my previous practice of finding the optimum split(s) using TrainSplit and then booking the individual tickets on the TfW website, and trouser the full saving!
Thanks for that explanation Adam. I don't imagine the RARS and journey planner costs amount to £25 for a single journey though, so still feeling ripped off.
The problem with it is that it's not a flat fee that in any way reflects the costs of those things, but rather a share of saving which is sometimes way in excess of what they would be (it is quite high in this case). Because rebooking causes a different saving to be made and thus a fee to be charged for that, I can completely see why the original poster doesn't like it.
This isn't a speculative thread so isn't the place to suggest how it should be done, but I think I agree with them that the way it is done is a little unfair when the fee is quite high as it was here.
On the upside, the admin fee is only £5 per split, when it could be £10 per ticket.
You'd be surprised at how punitive some of the rail industry charges are nowadays for the crime of searching for "too much" advance availability. It's significant enough that you could hire FTE if the cost wasn't there.
You'd be surprised at how punitive some of the rail industry charges are nowadays for the crime of searching for "too much" advance availability. It's significant enough that you could hire FTE if the cost wasn't there.
It sounds like they've been incurring costs for a while:
I shall revert to my previous practice of finding the optimum split(s) using TrainSplit and then booking the individual tickets on the TfW website, and trouser the full saving!
Adam, it was because my conscience was pricking me that I decided to do the right thing and actually book my tickets with TrainSplit. That decision has now come to bite me on the backside to the tune of £25. Hence my indignation.
While I accept it was my mistake that led to the need to refund my ticket, I do feel that TrainSplit retaining the total amount of the commission in this instance is punitive, and perhaps the amount retained in the event of a refund should be capped at some level?
I don't think I provided any details of my actual journey, but as you seem to have been able to obtain the fare details for it, does this indicate you have a connection with TrainSplit?
TBH, after this experience, I think I shall revert to my previous practice of finding the optimum split(s) using TrainSplit and then booking the individual tickets on the TfW website, and trouser the full saving!
This makes no sense, as you are rewarding TfW who are charging people much more for the through journey. You are rewarding a company that tried to make you pay over £270 more for the original journey!
Given Trainsplit charges no booking fees, it's no cheaper to use the TfW website, and indeed using the TfW website will cost you more than Trainsplit for longer distance journeys.
If you are keen to avoid the share of savings fee in future, then please use the same site you found the savings to add each ticket individually to the basket, and then pay for it all in one transaction on that same site.
It's completely unacceptable to use a site that finds ways around TfW's premium pricing, then use that information to book with a different site instead of booking each ticket with the site that helped you.
Furthermore, it could come back to bite you, as the admin fees on TOC sites (I'm not sure about TfW specifically) are generally charged on a per ticket basis, so if you change several Advance fares in one booking on a TOC site, it could cost (say) £25 if there are five tickets. Trainsplit would only charge £5 for an entire booking (regardless of the number of journeys/tickets in the booking).
Some TOCs don't charge such fees, but they are still trying to charge premium pricing whenever they can get away with it. Even if they don't charge fees, they may refuse to issue refunds/changes under certain circumstances; we've seen all sorts of issues posted on this forum of instances where TOCs are trying to mistreat people.
Also, with TOC sites you lose seat selection (except with LNER, Avanti and one or two others, when using their own site for their own services, meaning multiple transactions for multi-TOC journeys!) and TOCs also engage in fishing activities trying to catch people out if they think people may be using invalid tickets, and all sorts of dodgy behaviour they get up to. The TOCs are not your friends and are very much out to catch passengers out, while typically sourcing out customer relations to offshore companies, so you're not always dealing with knowledgeable UK staff.
By contrast, Trainsplit has UK based staff and is run by people who actually have to pay for their tickets and are genuine travellers who actually care about the passenger experience, so you really are going after the wrong people in my opinion.
Also, any refunds do not mean the retailer gets their rail industry fees refunded, nor any of their running costs. They still have to pay the various "lennon" fees, TOD or e-ticket issuing fees, server costs, staff costs etc. The commission on ticket sales is very small as TOCs are very reluctant for third party sites to be financially viable.
If you want to try to harm the people who are trying to do good for passengers, then I can't stop you, but anyone who uses a site designed to find cheaper fares to then purchase those cheaper fares on a TOC site is morally doing the wrong thing and there's never any moral justification for doing that, so I do hope you reconsider!
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If anyone has any ideas to come up with an alternative funding model that would both avoid booking fees and also keep staff from being outsourced, feel free to come up with one (in a separate thread).
If you can't charge fees to people who just search and don't buy, and it's not feasible to charge fees for bookings, then there has to be a charge for something else, as the commission the TOCs pay to retailers has decreased to the point where it's now very low indeed, while the TOCs still charge lots of fees to retailers, which don't get refunded if the passenger refunds their ticket, through no fault of the retailer.
The refund admin fee is capped at £5 per booking reference (even if you book 10 journeys as part of one basket), which is far less than £10 per ticket which some other retailers and train companies charge directly.
There are, of course, retailers with no refund admin fees, typically where their main business is subsidised through other work such as supplying a train company's retail site. Or where they have huge amounts of investor capital to waste in an attempt to build up a dedicated user base.
The share of saving fee does get refunded in the case of a disruption refund, and in some other limited circumstances, but ultimately the costs from the industry are borne by TrainSplit whether you use your ticket or refund it, so refunding those costs every time would be a sure-fire way to lose money.
I can understand the OP's frustration in losing £25, but ultimately they have admitted it was their error, and they spotted it well outside of the 1-hour fee-free refund window for non-same-day-travel bookings. I don't know the details of what their new booking is, but I do wonder if, even including the £25 lost, whether they have still saved a large sum over buying a ticket for their journey directly from TfW...
This thread has been quite illuminating. For example. I did not know there was a cost incurred by TrainSplit just for searching for tickets. Had I known this, I would have been even less comfortable about using their website without ultimately buying tickets from them.
Also, I had not considered that if I had bought the three Advance tickets required for this journey from TfW and then refunded them, then I would have incurred three separate refund fees. That is a significant advantage in using TrainSplit.
Another positive aspect of buying through TrainSplit is that the e-ticket pdf includes a page showing the complete itinerary. In the case of a disrupted journey, this could be very useful in explaining ones journey/ticketing to railway staff.
BTW, I consider myself to be a reasonably savvy railway user, and would never have entertained just buying whatever single ticket TfW suggested.
I suspect that my experience with TrainSplit might be something of an 'edge case' due to the very significant saving involved and consequently large commission amount. I still think that a cap on the amount of commission retained in the event of a refund should be considered.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions to this thread.
I always buy my tickets through the forum website and was grateful last week when they notified me of delays & cancellations to my connecting trains which allowed me to catch my booked train from Kings Cross.
The staff at Reading were less than helpful when on platform 11 they suggested going to the ticket office to ask if my advance ticket was valid on an earlier train due to depart in 3 minutes.
We are aware of an issue with emails from the Forum to Microsoft-based email accounts (hotmail/outlook/live.com email addresses). This is being looked into currently, thanks for your patience meanwhile.
