TransPennine Express checking the appetite for charging for seat reservations?

[Bletchleyite]

National Express tried it many years ago with their Anglia and East Coast franchises. Free with advance tickets, £5 otherwise.

Given that nobody else followed them, I think we can assume it didn’t go well.

Like bicycles, the main issue is that consideration creates a contract, and the railway doesn't want the confrontations and resulting staff assaults relating to either, nor I suspect the faff around refunding and compensating for non delivery.

 

[Mikw]

It's what Flixbus do now. Ok if you board at the originating station. But, if you board at a subsequent station someone is always in your seat pretending to be asleep or pretending they don't speak English. Causes a lot of issues, so a big "NO" from me

 

[Bishops]

Was on a TPE coming back from Blackpool the other week and the amount of seats showing as reserved but not taken up was amazing in my carriage.

if this prevents this happening then it can only be a good thing for passengers overall

 

[King Lazy]

I wonder if the seats reserved but not taken is down to people booking a train giving them leeway but then finding they’re at the station in time for an earlier one if for example their flight it lands early and they get through baggage reclaim quickly.

While I agree that any customer with a valid ticket can sit in an unoccupied reserved seat I often find it difficult to relax. Every person walking down the aisle is potentially going to move you if they’ve just been to the shop or toilet and find you occupying their seat.

A lot of people I suspect simply stand if a seat says reserved even if it is unoccupied.

Perhaps reserving a seat should have a clause that your ticket is only valid on the train you reserved the seat for. I suspect on many journeys with a decent frequency such as Avant’s Manchester to London people reserve because they can and then if they find a train 20 mins ahead they will take that.

Anecdotally it seems guards get a huge number of requests along the lines of “I’ve got a ticket for this train but we got here early. Can I get on here” and that will only be from those who have specific train only tickets. More open tickets wouldn’t require them to ask but would leave a seat clearly reserved that someone an hour later may be hesitant to occupy.

To add to the list of reservation issues LowLevel posted upthread. As a driver one of my bugbears with reservations is when I pull into a station. 100 people manage to board/leave the train but then one group walks slowly the full length of the platform to the coach with their allocated seats and we leave 2 minutes late.

I’ve also seen passengers on a TOC that doesn’t do reservations confidently announce to a party sat at a table that “we booked those seats” and the seated passengers (probably afraid of confrontation in the face of such a bold approach) simply vacated.

I wonder how many of those “travel hack” things that do the rounds on the internet are teaching people to use reservation systems in a manner they weren’t intended for.

 

[Bletchleyite]

To an extent the sense in this also depends on what TPE is going to be post route upgrade. If we're going to end up with something like a long northern Elizabeth Line with very frequent services, you don't want to be designing it around mostly reserved intercity style travel.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Was on a TPE coming back from Blackpool the other week and the amount of seats showing as reserved but not taken up was amazing in my carriage.

if this prevents this happening then it can only be a good thing for passengers overall

Yes-if people have to pay to reserve I bet it will be a completely different story.

 

[Russel]

Anyone with a valid ticket can sit in a seat that shows as reserved but is vacant.

I know that, you know that, most of the people on this forum know that, but many normal passengers don't and won't sit in a seat that says reserved...

 

[43096]

Perhaps a good way to trail charging for seat reservations would be to continue to offer them free on Advance tickets but charge for flexible tickets or standalone reservations.

That’s the wrong way round. I’d go for advance tickets as counted places and anyone can reserve a seat for an extra fee. It is frankly unacceptable for those paying more to be disadvantaged with regard to getting a seat.

 

[ic31420]

” things that do the rounds on the internet are teaching people to use reservation systems in a manner they weren’t intended for.

Like what?

To an extent the sense in this also depends on what TPE is going to be post route upgrade. If we're going to end up with something like a long northern Elizabeth Line with very frequent services, you don't want to be designing it around mostly reserved intercity style travel.

We have the issue then of transpennine not really being an intercity or local operator and we don't really do "regional" in this country.

What will TP's fleet be in 10 -15 years time?

 

[JonathanH]

It's what Flixbus do now. Ok if you board at the originating station. But, if you board at a subsequent station someone is always in your seat pretending to be asleep or pretending they don't speak English. Causes a lot of issues, so a big "NO" from me

Flixbus has to be full reservations because they upsell being able to have a vacant seat next to you. It would be impossible to offer that if some passengers had choice of free seating.

Megabus, in its latter days, had an area of general seating, and paid for seats further forward. Once the general seating was full, any further passengers had to pay for a reservation.

The railway can't really go for either of those models while it continues to offer walk-on travel.

Was on a TPE coming back from Blackpool the other week and the amount of seats showing as reserved but not taken up was amazing in my carriage.

if this prevents this happening then it can only be a good thing for passengers overall

Until such time as it is genuinely compulsory to sit in the seat that has been reserved for a ticket to be valid for travel it is relatively natural for people to want to spread out into 'better' seats rather than sit in the seat that has been reserved for them.

 

[riceuten]

No doubt it will be like the paid room selector on Travelodge, if the room you picked isn't available for whatever reason you get a refund.

Ha, you're lucky to get a room in the hotel if you arrive late and not be told that the hotel is full and you will need to make your way to an alternative 20 miles away.

 

[speedy1]

Like bicycles, the main issue is that consideration creates a contract, and the railway doesn't want the confrontations and resulting staff assaults relating to either

We really need to fix the awful situation of any enforcing of rules or norms mean staff are assaulted. It's not right for staff to be assaulted on a daily basis up and down the country.

Why are ticket checks still happening?

Why aren't they striking about it? I would support them

 

[JonathanH]

We really need to fix the awful situation of any enforcing of rules or norms mean staff are assaulted. It's not right for staff to be assaulted on a daily basis up and down the country.

Why are ticket checks still happening?

Why aren't they striking about it? I would support them

This is one good thing about back office processing of irregularities which can act to move the conflict away from personal interaction, but it doesn't seem easy to do that with seat reservations.

When (and why?) did reservations become free? I've just checked and they were 0/3/- in 1967(!) up to 60p in 1982. DB seem happy to charge a few euros for their reservations.

I want to say sometime in the mid-2000s. I certainly remember there being a fee in the early part of the decade when I was booking tickets. I think I want to say that Advance tickets came with a reservation, so it was seen as unfair that you had to pay extra on the expensive ticket to get something you got for free on the cheap one.

About ten years earlier, early in the privatisation era, although South West Trains continued to charge for reservations for longer.

 

[trainophile]

Must admit that with TPE 5-coach trains, although I do make a reservation, I generally go for the unreserved coach, with a better chance of having a double to myself.

I’ve noticed that I often get allocated a seat next to an already reserved one, even when the rest of the coach has barely any reservations showing at the time of booking. In this instance the seat selector is handy, although there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t subsequently be allocated the adjacent seat to my newly chosen one.

I can hardly remember prior to Covid whether we were always so reluctant to sit next to a stranger. It certainly changed things.

 

[Bishops]

Until such time as it is genuinely compulsory to sit in the seat that has been reserved for a ticket to be valid for travel it is relatively natural for people to want to spread out into 'better' seats rather than sit in the seat that has been reserved for them.

I would be more than happy for this to become an enforceable bylaw on the railway especially as with e tickets you cant just thrown your reservation away.

 

[Class83]

I would be more than happy for this to become an enforceable bylaw on the railway especially as with e tickets you cant just thrown your reservation away.

Reservations ceasing to be valid, if not claimed within 5-10 minutes of boarding, would be a lot more reasonable, I've had reservations next to someone in a carriage with 10 people, clearly one of us was going to move.

Announcement on Departure "This train is busy, please ensure you are sat in your reserved seat in the next 5 minutes"

Announcement 5 mins later "Any seats reserved from <station we just departed> are now available for any standing passengers"

 

[JonathanH]

I would be more than happy for this to become an enforceable bylaw on the railway especially as with e tickets you cant just thrown your reservation away.

I think there is an occupancy threshold at which people will sit in their reserved seat, particularly if there is a vacant pair of seats elsewhere.

As the poster above notes, if the train is 25% full and the reservation puts a single traveller next to someone they don't know, it is in neither traveller's interest to sit on the same pair of seats.

 

[JamesT]

As I think has been already mentioned, making it easier to revoke your reservation if you don’t need it. One instance that comes to mind is upgrades, if I’m sitting in my first class seat I don’t need the one in standard.

 

[mpthomson]

And if I paid for seat B34 because it's a table seat facing forwards, and the train arrives in reverse formation so I'm sitting backwards? The seat exists, I sat in it, but it wasn't what I paid (potentially a higher price) for?

Given the many routes that the units work they can't possibly guarantee seat direction. They just won't offer that as an option.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Aug 2026 ==

I wonder if the seats reserved but not taken is down to people booking a train giving them leeway but then finding they’re at the station in time for an earlier one if for example their flight it lands early and they get through baggage reclaim quickly.

While I agree that any customer with a valid ticket can sit in an unoccupied reserved seat I often find it difficult to relax. Every person walking down the aisle is potentially going to move you if they’ve just been to the shop or toilet and find you occupying their seat.

A lot of people I suspect simply stand if a seat says reserved even if it is unoccupied.

Perhaps reserving a seat should have a clause that your ticket is only valid on the train you reserved the seat for. I suspect on many journeys with a decent frequency such as Avant’s Manchester to London people reserve because they can and then if they find a train 20 mins ahead they will take that.

Anecdotally it seems guards get a huge number of requests along the lines of “I’ve got a ticket for this train but we got here early. Can I get on here” and that will only be from those who have specific train only tickets. More open tickets wouldn’t require them to ask but would leave a seat clearly reserved that someone an hour later may be hesitant to occupy.

To add to the list of reservation issues LowLevel posted upthread. As a driver one of my bugbears with reservations is when I pull into a station. 100 people manage to board/leave the train but then one group walks slowly the full length of the platform to the coach with their allocated seats and we leave 2 minutes late.

I’ve also seen passengers on a TOC that doesn’t do reservations confidently announce to a party sat at a table that “we booked those seats” and the seated passengers (probably afraid of confrontation in the face of such a bold approach) simply vacated.

I wonder how many of those “travel hack” things that do the rounds on the internet are teaching people to use reservation systems in a manner they weren’t intended for.

I frequently use off peak returns for work purposes and always reserve both ways. I'm always in the outbound seat but if my meeting finishes early or overruns then I won't be using the seat on the return, although for the majority of journeys I'm on the one booked back as well. If you make it that you have to be on the train your seat is reserved on then you'd end up getting rid of all tickets other than advances...

What should exist, although it wouldn't be simple for those trains that require paper reservation tickets, is an 'unreserve my seat' feature on the ticketing app that allows you to give it up if you know you are going to be on a different train.

 

[Mat17]

I hate seat reservations. I once boarded a 3 car 185 at Piccadilly and almost every single seat on the train was reserved. I did take one of the unoccupied reserved seats after the train had departed. I thought, well that's not great.

I have had reserved seats myself on long distance. I ended up in the aisle seat, at a bay of four table, travelling forwards, the complete opposite of what I would have chosen. It was lightly loaded, so I went and found a window seat, going backwards in airline seating. I was lucky that day.

 

[Parallel]

Seat reservations are OK for longer distance services or journeys, but less good on short or regional trains.

I don’t think it’s necessarily right to give a seat reservation for every AP customer as standard.

Perhaps they should be given when journey exceeds a certain amount of time, e.g 45 minutes, with anyone else requiring one, being able to pre-book a reservation separately via a portal on the TOC website or via their customer care teams, this would mean those less able to stand could still book reasonably easily. I bet quite a few of the travelling public wouldn’t bother making an effort to reserve a seat - it would also mean you could have a larger proportion of unreserved seats/carriages than we do now. CrossCountry not even having half an unreserved carriage on a 4 car Voyager is criminal!

 

[Farigiraf]

Obviously this is a DfT led cost-cutting move above all else.

Putting that aside, genuinely what would charging for reservations offer compared to simply giving advance ticket holders a tickbox to opt out of a reservation? Plus not offering them at all for sub-20 min trips.
Helps with the empty reserved seat problem while not taxing people who do genuinely just want a guaranteed seat.

Of course many people will still opt for a reservation and may not use it in practice, and a £1-2 charge may encourage those people to actually sit in the seat they reserved. But if this is only a minority of people, then it's not important and shouldn't require having all others pay extra. If it's more than a minority, i.e. a regular occurence on most services, then at that point you may as well get rid of reservations altogether to solve the musical chairs game. After all, if there's capacity on the train for the reservation holder to sit elsewhere, then most people are unlikely to have issues with finding a seat if reservations were to be abolished.

Then again, if TPE were to run longer trains on the WCML services and eliminate 3-car 185 working altogether, this wouldn't really be a problem. The upcoming BEMU replacement stock only being 5-cars wasn't a great move unless they're committed to running 10-cars at peak times.

 

[flitwickbeds]

Given the many routes that the units work they can't possibly guarantee seat direction. They just won't offer that as an option.

If there is a seat selector - possibly with higher charges for "better" seats a la low cost airlines - then sure they will. And of course a forward facing seat at a table next to the window would be more valuable than an aisle seat facing backwards without a table.

 

[Bevan Price]

There were reports in May about how TPE has weaker-than-expected revenue performance, I suppose this is to help offset that somewhat?

With so many diversions, cancellations, service revisions due to the "upgrade", it is hardly surprising if passenger use has (temporarily) declined.

 

[Krokodil]

Given the many routes that the units work they can't possibly guarantee seat direction. They just won't offer that as an option.

The workaround on 175s was that every table had pairs of seats (e.g. 17, 17, 18, 18), the seat reservations would be numbered 17F, 17R, 18F, 18R and reservation cards placed according to the direction of travel.

 

[LittleRedTrain]

What should exist, although it wouldn't be simple for those trains that require paper reservation tickets, is an 'unreserve my seat' feature on the ticketing app that allows you to give it up if you know you are going to be on a different train.

Paper reservations need to die a death!
They slow boarding down as people looking for a seat have to read the tiny text to determine whether the seat is free for their journey.

They're also much more inaccessible to the visually-impaired than a bright LED display, alongside a coloured status LED.

The Voyagers have had electronic reservations for over 20 years now, any TOC who hasn't modernised their stock to also feature them should've got with the programme years ago!

 

[Bayum]

And how are disabled travellers going to be impacted by this? Mandatory use of the priority seats? Proof of disability via the forced use of a disabled railcard?

 

[yorkie]

If there is a seat selector - possibly with higher charges for "better" seats a la low cost airlines - then sure they will. And of course a forward facing seat at a table next to the window would be more valuable than an aisle seat facing backwards without a table.

There already is a seat selector, if you know where to book

I have had reserved seats myself on long distance. I ended up in the aisle seat, at a bay of four table, travelling forwards, the complete opposite of what I would have chosen. It was lightly loaded, so I went and found a window seat, going backwards in airline seating. I was lucky that day.

The forum ticketing site has a seat selector, so you can avoid that in future

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Aug 2026 ==

And how are disabled travellers going to be impacted by this? Mandatory use of the priority seats? Proof of disability via the forced use of a disabled railcard?

I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but presumably you are hinting that it wouldn't be right for disabled people to be charged for a seat reservation?

Reservations aren't going to incur a cost; it simply isn't happening. If anyone thinks it is, they are very wrong and clueless, as the concept was already proven to be a failure by GWR a few years ago.

A disabled railcard isn't an indicator of whether or not someone would find it difficult to sit down. Nothing is going to be mandatory.

 

[Bayum]

The forum ticketing site has a seat selector, so you can avoid that in future

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 10 Aug 2026 ==


I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but presumably you are hinting that it wouldn't be right for disabled people to be charged for a seat reservation?

Well, everyone else is discussing as speculation so I raised what k saw as an issue.

 

[flitwickbeds]

Asking first about how valuable seat reservations are to me, whether picking from a seating chart is useful, then it flips onto a pricing grid. How much would I be prepared to pay for a reservation?

(My bold) from the OP.

Reservations aren't going to incur a cost; it simply isn't happening. If anyone thinks it is, they are very wrong and clueless, as the concept was already proven to be a failure by GWR a few years ago.