Welsh Discount Fares

[Belperpete]

It seems to me that the forum's ticketing site doesn't support Welsh travel options very well, certainly compared to London.

For example, holders of London concessionary passes can enter these in the forum's ticketing site to get a through itinerary, however I can't find any way of entering a Welsh Concessionary Pass. I would like to get a through itinerary/fare, say from Blaenau Ffestiniog to London for someone who holds both a Concessionary Pass and a Senior Railcard. If the site can support London concessionary passes for such journeys, why doesn't it support other concessionary passes?

Note: holders of Welsh Concessionary Travel Passes are entitled to free travel on certain rail lines, in some cases year-round and in other cases between October and March. Do these fares appear in the BR Fares web-site? There appear to be two options in the Railcard/Discount box: "Welsh Assembly Govt" and "WG Conc Bus Pass". However, both options give the result "No fares available" when querying some sample journeys, e.g. Blaenau Ffestiniog to Llandudno Junction.

As a second example, it is possible to buy tickets including both train and TrawsCymru bus. For example, Holyhead to Machynlleth by train to Bangor and then T2 bus to Machynlleth, at £15.30. These fares appear on the BR Fares web site, however, the forum's ticketing site only offers the considerably more expensive and time-consuming option of travel via Chester at over £40. As these fares appear on BR Fares, why doesn't the forum's ticketing site offer them?

 

[MrJeeves]

Much of this is because any such feature (e.g., free travel) would need to be manually implemented within the journey planner, and I would guess the number of people with London-centric passes is higher than Welsh ones.

There's no electronic data for any of this, and given industry information regarding the concessionary travel scheme is completely outdated (it states it is only a Railcard, for journeys on the Valley Lines, and cannot be used to get discounts online) compared to what the TfW site says, it would probably be challenging to keep up-to-date with future changes.

Plus the fact that you apparently need to still "buy" a free ticket rather than just using the pass as your ticket adds even more complexity to the equation, especially given all(?) ticket machines will ignore tickets that cost £0 if you try to print them...

Not to mention random rules such as:

We don’t provide free tickets for journeys wholly between Shrewsbury and Bucknell and Llanelli and Swansea.

I won't say things like this will never be supported, but there's more factors than us just not wanting to at play.

As a second example, it is possible to buy tickets including both train and TrawsCymru bus. For example, Holyhead to Machynlleth by train to Bangor and then T2 bus to Machynlleth, at £15.30. These fares appear on the BR Fares web site, however, the forum's ticketing site only offers the considerably more expensive and time-consuming option of travel via Chester at over £40. As these fares appear on BR Fares, why doesn't the forum's ticketing site offer them?

They appear just fine for me:

Results | RailUK Tickets

TrainSplit is a free service that makes it easy to find the cheapest train tickets for your journey.

tickets.railforums.co.uk

And you should be able to force them with a via point of Bangor or an avoid point of Shrewsbury.

 

[nwales58]

Just buy the paid-for ticket separately? It's what I and everyone I know does.

If it's not an advance you need, on Cambrian coast and Conwy valley it's totally normal to board and ask the guard for a concession single and to sell you the onward ticket from Llandudno Junction or Machynlleth. Cross-London tickets do involve buying at the Junction, or Barmouth machine or Machynlleth ticket office during the usually long-enough waits.

In disruption, there is the question of whether you're entitled to be got home without a ticket already bought but in practice Cambrian guard usually asks for passenger destinations some time after Shrewsbury and Machynlleth arranges the replacement minibus regardless.

 

[Belperpete]

Just buy the paid-for ticket separately? It's what I and everyone I know does.

If it's not an advance you need, on Cambrian coast and Conwy valley it's totally normal to board and ask the guard for a concession single and to sell you the onward ticket from Llandudno Junction or Machynlleth. Cross-London tickets do involve buying at the Junction, or Barmouth machine or Machynlleth ticket office during the usually long-enough waits.

In disruption, there is the question of whether you're entitled to be got home without a ticket already bought but in practice Cambrian guard usually asks for passenger destinations some time after Shrewsbury and Machynlleth arranges the replacement minibus regardless.

Because, as mentioned on another recent thread, not having tickets or even itinerary for your complete journey can give you big problems when disruption occurs, particularly on return journeys. Consider the case of coming back from London to Blaenau. Yes, you can get your ticket to Blaenau when you get to Llandudno Junction (if the booking office is open) or on the Blaenau train. But what if the Avanti service from London is late enough that you miss the connections for the Blaenau train? It will be three hours before your next Blaenau train, but without an itinerary or ticket to Blaenau you are going to have fun claiming delay repay from Avanti. And if you miss the last train to Blaenau, you won't be able to get a ticket for the train that you have missed, and without an itinerary or ticket you will be in a very weak position as regards assistance getting home. If the TfW services from Chester and the Junction ran on time, are TfW going to arrange alternative transport for someone without either ticket or itinerary?

A similar situation can arise on the Cambrian if the Avanti service from London is late enough to miss the connection at Birmingham, such that you miss the connections for the Pwllheli train. It may be only an hour until the next Machynlleth train, but two or even three hours before the next connection to Pwllheli. But if you only have a ticket and itinerary for Machynlleth, good luck with claiming delay repay from Avanti for a journey to Pwllheli. And if the Cambrian services are running normally, there won't be any replacement minibuses if you have missed the last connection.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Dec 2025 ==

Much of this is because any such feature (e.g., free travel) would need to be manually implemented within the journey planner, and I would guess the number of people with London-centric passes is higher than Welsh ones.

You seem to be saying that the site can't be bothered about Welsh pass holders because there are fewer of them than London pass holders.

There's no electronic data for any of this, and given industry information regarding the concessionary travel scheme is completely outdated (it states it is only a Railcard, for journeys on the Valley Lines, and cannot be used to get discounts online) compared to what the TfW site says, it would probably be challenging to keep up-to-date with future changes.

Surely the site should be pressing for the electronic information to be provided, rather than just using it as an excuse.

Plus the fact that you apparently need to still "buy" a free ticket rather than just using the pass as your ticket adds even more complexity to the equation, especially given all(?) ticket machines will ignore tickets that cost £0 if you try to print them...

For London pass holders, it gets around this problem by advising you to use your pass for the appropriate part of the journey, but apparently still provides an itinerary for the complete journey.

Not to mention random rules such as:

That fares aren't available between certain defined stations doesn't sound very complicated to me.

This seems a rather feeble collection of poor excuses.

If it is possible to provide a button for holders of London concessionary passes, it should surely be possible to provide an equivalent button for holders of Welsh concessionary passes. Even if that only popped up a warning that the site can't be bothered working out the best deal for holders of such passes, and where information can be found about them, it would be something. As it stands, the site seems to be knowingly over-charging Welsh concessionary pass holders, by charging for parts of journeys that should be free.

They appear just fine for me:

Results | RailUK Tickets

TrainSplit is a free service that makes it easy to find the cheapest train tickets for your journey.

tickets.railforums.co.uk

And you should be able to force them with a via point of Bangor or an avoid point of Shrewsbury.

After a lot of investigating, it appears that despite me thinking that I was starting the search from scratch, the site had saved a "via" point from a previous search, which meant that I didn't see the combined fares.

 

[Belperpete]

I have spotted that TfW's website includes a button for Welsh Concessionary Pass holder discounts. So much for it being too difficult to do.

So if the TfW journey planner can do it, why can't this site's journey planner? Is it really just a case of can't be bothered?

 

[Watershed]

As with all the TOCs, TfW will have paid for the development work to be done to add that to their site. Since they are the TOC that offers the concession this is hardly surprising. Meanwhile TrainSplit only have a small proportion of the overall third party retailer market, and holders of Welsh Concessionary passes will make up a miniscule percentage of their user base.

Do you have any idea how valuable, and therefore expensive, developers' time is? And how much legwork (testing, possible accreditation, pilot monitoring etc.) is involved in adding such a discount to an accredited retailing site/app? You could easily be looking at the high 4 or low 5 figures worth of work.

It is therefore not a question of whether it is possible but whether there is any kind of reasonable business case for it, given the thin margins that third party retailers operate on. You would probably have to sell an extra 6+ figures of Welsh Concessionary Pass discounted tickets for the sales commission to cover it.

It would make just as much sense to say the Welsh government "can't be bothered" to electrify and double the Cambrian line throughout...

 

[OscarH]

Surely the site should be pressing for the electronic information to be provided, rather than just using it as an excuse.

I can assure you that many of the team have spent a lot of time pressuring for improved data in many many areas of the industry. The organisation has also been a sponsor to a conference about open data, and several employees (myself included) have attended in their own time out of choice. We really do believe in improving these things so that, amongst many other things, all these discounts can programatically just work!

Unfortunately you would not believe how resistant most of the industry is to change, or improvement, it's incredibly frustrating for us too I can assure you.

At the end of the day we're a small team, as is the relevant supplier, and we all have to do lists that would overrun a whole ream of A4 - we'd love to do the manual work to support this, but time is limited and things have to be prioritised. These free passes are quite a long and tedious process to get working, and there are other changes which would impact more customers at the end of the day.

 

[MrJeeves]

I would like to get a through itinerary/fare, say from Blaenau Ffestiniog to London for someone who holds both a Concessionary Pass and a Senior Railcard. If the site can support London concessionary passes for such journeys, why doesn't it support other concessionary passes?

I have spotted that TfW's website includes a button for Welsh Concessionary Pass holder discounts. So much for it being too difficult to do.

So if the TfW journey planner can do it, why can't this site's journey planner? Is it really just a case of can't be bothered?

Have you tried it?

All it actually does is offer the Railcard-like discount for journeys on the Valley Lines.

It does not do what you were describing in your original posts, and won't tell you that your travel could be free if you search for a journey like Wrexham to Blaenau Ffestiniog, or do anything smart like selling a ticket for part of a journey when some is covered by the free travel pass like TrainSplit's London-centric pass functionality.

In fact, it will just sell you a full price ticket for a journey like Blaenau to Llandudno. Is that actually good, or are most people going to look at that and pay for their travel which should have been free?

Your original post didn't mention any kind of Railcard-like discount, which in theory would actually be possible for us to enable relatively easily unlike a product which offers free travel.

As Oscar has said, and as I have said prior, if there was industry data to support any of the free travel facilities this pass offers, we'd happily look to support it, but as Watershed also says, supporting and maintaining these custom rules would have a significant negative return on investment.

 

[alastair]

Just buy the paid-for ticket separately? It's what I and everyone I know does.

If it's not an advance you need, on Cambrian coast and Conwy valley it's totally normal to board and ask the guard for a concession single and to sell you the onward ticket from Llandudno Junction or Machynlleth. Cross-London tickets do involve buying at the Junction, or Barmouth machine or Machynlleth ticket office during the usually long-enough waits.

In disruption, there is the question of whether you're entitled to be got home without a ticket already bought but in practice Cambrian guard usually asks for passenger destinations some time after Shrewsbury and Machynlleth arranges the replacement minibus regardless.

I know this is different to the point you are making, but to tell anyone on the Cambrian line to "buy on board" seems very poor advice (provided you have a smartphone) given that the TFW app sells advances up to a few minutes before departure. To take an example at random : Porthmadog/Machynlleth single (with a senior railcard) leaving now, the app offers me an advance single on the 1201 for £7.55 or an anytime day single for £11.40. I'm assuming the latter would have been sold to me if I'd waited to buy on board. That's a decent 34% discount.

 

[Krokodil]

I know this is different to the point you are making, but to tell anyone on the Cambrian line to "buy on board" seems very poor advice (provided you have a smartphone) given that the TFW app sells advances up to a few minutes before departure. To take an example at random : Porthmadog/Machynlleth single (with a senior railcard) leaving now, the app offers me an advance single on the 1201 for £7.55 or an anytime day single for £11.40. I'm assuming the latter would have been sold to me if I'd waited to buy on board. That's a decent 34% discount.

If you're using a Welsh Concessionary Travel Card then obtaining that leg's ticket onboard is precisely what one should do.

 

[styles]

If you're using a Welsh Concessionary Travel Card then obtaining that leg's ticket onboard is precisely what one should do.

Indeed.

Much like ScotRail's 'Kids for a Quid', they can only be issued by staff, presumably to avoid people getting ridiculously cheap or free tickets they're not eligible for.