XC Seat Selection

[aquae39]

There is quite a downgrade to the new XC website booking system that gives me a bad seat without matching my entered seating preferences.
It becomes even worse with multiple passengers that splits people into different rows. I remember that the old booking system can select any unreserved seats and it works well.
Are there any website have better alternatives for XC seat selection? I won't use their booking system anymore until it has the seat selection back.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Trainsplit (and Raileasy/new.trainsplit.com if you don't want a split ticket) has seat selection for all TOCs. However XC still have something weird going on like it was still socially distanced, so the plan looks odd (though you can find a Voyager seating plan online easily enough) and only a small subset of the seats are available to select.

 

[Adam Williams]

the plan looks odd and only a small subset of the seats are available to select

I think it would be fair to say some TOCs have more work to do than others, when it comes to the data they're responsible for in the industry reservations system, RARS2. Hopefully in time improvements can be made.

 

[yorkie]

Yes your best bet is to use Trainsplit (this will probably mean you pay less for many XC journeys!) and refer to a seating plan; as others have said there is only a small proportion of the overall seats available and it looks a mess. Not all visible seats will be selectable either.

• HSTs: https://www.crosscountrytrains.co.uk/media/1048/hst_seating_plan.pdf
• Voyagers: https://www.crosscountrytrains.co.uk/media/1051/voyager_seating_plan.pdf
• Turbostars: https://www.crosscountrytrains.co.uk/media/1049/turbostar_seat_plan.pdf