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| London Transport (uk.transport.london) Discussion of all forms of transport in London. |
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#12
February 19th 16, 11:05 PM
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Best Web Sites For Rail Fare Bargains
In article , (Mizter T) wrote:
On 19/02/2016 17:59, wrote: In article , (Mizter T) wrote: On 19/02/2016 11:17, Robin9 wrote: I don't travel much by rail these days except in London. I'm completely out of touch with buying train tickets to places like Birmingham and Bristol. In my day it was all pretty simple; you just turned up and bought your ticket. There was the very occasional special offer: a friend and I went from Euston to Glasgow Central on an early train for £5.00 day return! That was more than forty years ago! (We wanted to visit St. Mungo's Cathedral) There are web sites providing train fare offers but which are the best ones? Am I correct in assuming that some will offer less than ideal rates because they receive a commission from train companies? Do they all work this angle? No, you're not correct. All sites essentially offer the same selection of tickets, but the booking sites of some train companies offer (small) discounts on Advance fares (for travel on specified trains), so long as the journey (or most of it) is on their own trains. Virgin Trains East Coast and East Midlands Trains do this. Some train companies also have temporary offers where flexible tickets for travel on their trains might be reduced. (The following two paragraphs are probably more info than you need... so skip to the final paragraph!) However there are a few ongoing ticket offerings which are only available from the train company's own booking site - e.g. Virgin Trains West Coast half-fares (when bought as part of a return journey); or Virgin Trains East Coast Super Off-Peak Single web-only fare (what a mouthful!), which must be bought at least a day in advance. Neither of these ticket offerings have any sort of explanation on their websites! There were also GTR school holiday time Web-only Super Off-Peak (or whatever the actual name was) tickets from Cambridge to London terminals last summer. Not purchasable any other way. As they have wrecked their ticket-buying web site and abandoned the excellent Webtis site they inherited from Southern GOK how this might work next summer. I reckon I'd covered that in my "temporary offers" sentence/paragraph above. Probably. (Did this not involve the Super Off-Peak tickets normally only available at weekends being made available throughout the week, albeit with time limitations and only available for purchase online?) They were cheaper than Super Off Peak tickets which also have 2 prices now, with AGA-only ones 10p (or 5p for railcard users) cheaper and available on weekdays on more limited hours than off-peak There are also "Megatrain" tickets, which are only offered on a limited number of South West Trains, East Midlands Trains and Virgin Trains West Coast journeys (though apparently not on the latter until the Lamington Viaduct is fixed). They are only available via the http://www.megatrain.com website. Lamington is due to re-open Monday. Though I imagine they might well wait until it's definitely happened before making megatrain tickets available again. We shall see very soon... (The final paragraph follows!...) The best approach is to buy your tickets from the booking site of the train company that you'll be travelling on for all or the majority of your journey. Do *not* buy from the Trainline or RedSpottedHanky or other sites that impose booking and credit card fees - there is no need to pay a booking fee (by doing so are just helping them fund their all-pervasive advertising!). Indeed so. That is a more fully spelt out of version of what I said. Verbosity, me, never! :-) -- Colin Rosenstiel |
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