London Banter - View Single Post

Barry Salter · August 24th 03, 10:26 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 00:30 +0100 (BST), (Colin
Rosenstiel) wrote:

Oddly, some journeys *are* cheaper by booking to and from boundary zone 6.
When I went to Reading the other day, a Peak Travelcard from Cambridge
plus a boundary zone 6 standard day return to Reading was quite a lot
cheaper than a standard day return from Cambridge to Reading. The main
problem was booking them at Cambridge! Odd, because they are supposed to
sell the cheapest fare for a particular journey.

True, but the requirement stated in the National Fares Manuals is as
follows:

quote

Tickets should always be sold for the throughout journey required unless
a customer specially requests more than one ticket for the journey. In
such cases the combination of tickets should cover the entire journey
being made.

/quote

The primary reason for this being that there are around 2500 stations in
the country and over 100 ticket types, so if your poor Ticket Office
Clerk was to go through every possible combination to try and get you
the cheapest fare it could take quite some time.

Apart from anything else, you wouldn't immediately think that a
Cambridge Peak TC + BZ6 to Oxford SDR would be cheaper than a Cambridge
to Oxford SDR via London as it's not obvious.

HTH,

Barry

--
Barry Salter,
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DISCLAIMER: The above comments do not necessarily represent the
views of my employers.