“Under the trial, a single is always half the cost of a return.”
That’s an important part of context to this. Good on them.
I’ve always seen a return being £1 more than a single as the return being a good deal, not the single as massively overcharging. Feel a bit foolish now
Why it’s cheaper to get a return then 2 singles. Or it all about £££££ these days
>Under the trial, a single is always half the cost of a return.
Right now if I book a few weeks in advance I can get two advance single tickets for less than the price of a return ticket. If “a single is always half the cost of a return” also applies to advance tickets I’m going to be paying more than I do now. Wicked.
There are so many issues with this concept. We have to understand that “the railway” won’t lose money. And they won’t go to the trouble of all this for it to be revenue neutral. Passengers need to open their eyes.
Sure, great news that a single is half the cost of a return, I can fully support that. This is something that we have needed for aslong as I can remember. The idea that a return is £1 more than the appropriate single is ridiculous. It came about when they introduced the saver fares (now off peak and where relevant, super off peak fares) as a way to encourage leisure travel when the trains weren’t as busy. Almost everyone went back to where they came from so the small difference between a single and a return didn’t matter.
Why not just make it 50% if it doesn’t matter? Well, evening peak restrictions don’t exist everywhere so if they made an off peak single half the price of the return people would buy an anytime single in the morning and an off peak one in the evening and the railway would lose out.
So why are they doing it now?
Travel patterns are different so it makes more sense to have half priced singles. It really DOES benefit people who only want to go one way.
Sadly the realistic results aren’t as promising.
Those who want to go A to B and back to A don’t benefit at all. But under normal circumstances they don’t lose either. Or do they?
With an off peak return you get 30 days to make the return part of your journey. You don’t have to do it all at once, if you did London to Edinburgh you could stop off at York to see a friend and stay overnight on the way back on one ticket. The cost of doing this now is over 60% more by buying 3 single tickets. This price increase isn’t registered as a price increase nor does it affect the average fare increase because it isn’t a fare increase it’s just a reduction in flexibility.
If you have a return ticket and you’re delayed by 2 hours you get the whole ticket price in compensation. With 2 singles you just get the single ticket value back. So your compensation for the most severe delays is halved.
If there is disruption and you choose not to travel you can get a full refund on your return ticket with no admin fee. With 2 singles you can only get a refund for the 1 ticket, the other becoming useless.
It’s not JUST about the price of tickets, a rail ticket has a value above and beyond the price printed on it, and it is in many cases these things that are being taken away from passengers. 2 £20 tickets has less value than 1 £40 ticket.
Leeds to London has completely lost the off peak fares. Now it’s just anytime and super off peak. So those who used to use off peak tickets now have to pay anytime prices. It’s a 40-50% price hike for those journeys, but these aren’t reported as such.
As for shorter runs, how will they half the price of day returns? Take Chesterfield to Sheffield, will they slash the price of the off peak day single to half the return? £3.15? I suspect whilst the trial suggests 50%, if they implement this nationwide we can expect the price to rise by stealth here too.
The railway is run entirely for the benefit of the railway.
I have this feeling we are in for another price hike and to get a return journey will end up more.
We really are just getting the piss taken out of us by our ‘leaders’ at this point.
This will 100% result in higher fares, at a time when we’re increasingly being encouraged to use public transport instead of cars. Nice one.
Get your feet off the seat, get your bag off the seat and stop monopolising the whole table by spreading your crap everywhere.
From my local station into London, the off-peak return journey is 10p more than the single journey. All well and good. BUT an off-peak single from London to my local station is about 40% more than the single into London. That nuance will be lost in a singles only world. (And at the moment if you want a single from London home, you buy a home to London return online for collection at the station, and just use the return portion – against the T&Cs I know, but hey).
I’d be ok with this if there was a station to buy my second ticket at, rather than a dilapidated industrial-looking platform with no staff or ticket machine. Bit risky when the penalty fares have gone up so much. I guess I could buy my tickets online but I’ve never been comfortable with that idea.
They think making it “simpler” is what will revive the industry…. They think a £70 single ticket is a “cheaper deal” lol- clueless or just so greedy they don’t get the trains are mostly shit, the service is ok at best and the fare price is through the roof.
Edit: lets be honest, they are only doing this so they can charge more, the making it simpler is only a bullshit excuse.
They should scrap the whole peak/off-peak concept first, it would make getting a ticket much simpler and stop people from getting fines for travelling at the wrong times. The ticket system is byzantine but return tickets are the least of commuters worries.
11 comments
“Under the trial, a single is always half the cost of a return.”
That’s an important part of context to this. Good on them.
I’ve always seen a return being £1 more than a single as the return being a good deal, not the single as massively overcharging. Feel a bit foolish now
Why it’s cheaper to get a return then 2 singles. Or it all about £££££ these days
>Under the trial, a single is always half the cost of a return.
Right now if I book a few weeks in advance I can get two advance single tickets for less than the price of a return ticket. If “a single is always half the cost of a return” also applies to advance tickets I’m going to be paying more than I do now. Wicked.
There are so many issues with this concept. We have to understand that “the railway” won’t lose money. And they won’t go to the trouble of all this for it to be revenue neutral. Passengers need to open their eyes.
Sure, great news that a single is half the cost of a return, I can fully support that. This is something that we have needed for aslong as I can remember. The idea that a return is £1 more than the appropriate single is ridiculous. It came about when they introduced the saver fares (now off peak and where relevant, super off peak fares) as a way to encourage leisure travel when the trains weren’t as busy. Almost everyone went back to where they came from so the small difference between a single and a return didn’t matter.
Why not just make it 50% if it doesn’t matter? Well, evening peak restrictions don’t exist everywhere so if they made an off peak single half the price of the return people would buy an anytime single in the morning and an off peak one in the evening and the railway would lose out.
So why are they doing it now?
Travel patterns are different so it makes more sense to have half priced singles. It really DOES benefit people who only want to go one way.
Sadly the realistic results aren’t as promising.
Those who want to go A to B and back to A don’t benefit at all. But under normal circumstances they don’t lose either. Or do they?
With an off peak return you get 30 days to make the return part of your journey. You don’t have to do it all at once, if you did London to Edinburgh you could stop off at York to see a friend and stay overnight on the way back on one ticket. The cost of doing this now is over 60% more by buying 3 single tickets. This price increase isn’t registered as a price increase nor does it affect the average fare increase because it isn’t a fare increase it’s just a reduction in flexibility.
If you have a return ticket and you’re delayed by 2 hours you get the whole ticket price in compensation. With 2 singles you just get the single ticket value back. So your compensation for the most severe delays is halved.
If there is disruption and you choose not to travel you can get a full refund on your return ticket with no admin fee. With 2 singles you can only get a refund for the 1 ticket, the other becoming useless.
It’s not JUST about the price of tickets, a rail ticket has a value above and beyond the price printed on it, and it is in many cases these things that are being taken away from passengers. 2 £20 tickets has less value than 1 £40 ticket.
Leeds to London has completely lost the off peak fares. Now it’s just anytime and super off peak. So those who used to use off peak tickets now have to pay anytime prices. It’s a 40-50% price hike for those journeys, but these aren’t reported as such.
As for shorter runs, how will they half the price of day returns? Take Chesterfield to Sheffield, will they slash the price of the off peak day single to half the return? £3.15? I suspect whilst the trial suggests 50%, if they implement this nationwide we can expect the price to rise by stealth here too.
The railway is run entirely for the benefit of the railway.
I have this feeling we are in for another price hike and to get a return journey will end up more.
We really are just getting the piss taken out of us by our ‘leaders’ at this point.
This will 100% result in higher fares, at a time when we’re increasingly being encouraged to use public transport instead of cars. Nice one.
Get your feet off the seat, get your bag off the seat and stop monopolising the whole table by spreading your crap everywhere.
From my local station into London, the off-peak return journey is 10p more than the single journey. All well and good. BUT an off-peak single from London to my local station is about 40% more than the single into London. That nuance will be lost in a singles only world. (And at the moment if you want a single from London home, you buy a home to London return online for collection at the station, and just use the return portion – against the T&Cs I know, but hey).
I’d be ok with this if there was a station to buy my second ticket at, rather than a dilapidated industrial-looking platform with no staff or ticket machine. Bit risky when the penalty fares have gone up so much. I guess I could buy my tickets online but I’ve never been comfortable with that idea.
They think making it “simpler” is what will revive the industry…. They think a £70 single ticket is a “cheaper deal” lol- clueless or just so greedy they don’t get the trains are mostly shit, the service is ok at best and the fare price is through the roof.
Edit: lets be honest, they are only doing this so they can charge more, the making it simpler is only a bullshit excuse.
They should scrap the whole peak/off-peak concept first, it would make getting a ticket much simpler and stop people from getting fines for travelling at the wrong times. The ticket system is byzantine but return tickets are the least of commuters worries.