Get rid of Advance fares

We have recently heard from two contributors defending Advance Purchase fares - Mark Smith ( RAIL 853) and Jeff Featherstone ( Open

Access, RAIL 854). Neither sell tickets to the general public, or have to try and sort out the problems arising. I do.

Mark and Jeff may understand the fares system, but product knowledge is very poor among the general population as a whole, who do the vast majority of journeys. We see the misconceptions and misunderstandings all the time.

Advance Purchase fares have created an expectation that you can get a discount by buying ahead on all sorts of journeys. It is a common theme, and perhaps partly explains why so many people happily pay booking fees to websites and end up with full-price walk-on fares, not realising they’ve paid over the odds.

How much time is spent searching for cheap rail tickets? If just two minutes is spent each time searching for one of the 1.1 billion non-season ticket journeys made a year, then the cost to the wider economy must run into hundreds of millions. And that’s not to mention the others who give up or who simply don’t bother even in the first place.

It’s all very well saying that investing time before purchase to get the best deal is the norm elsewhere in the economy, but rail fares are not the same as buying a vacuum cleaner where you can find the same model online from different retailers at different prices.

On the railway there are only different products on offer, all of which entitle you to travel on a train between two points where you have to know which poorly defined product allows you to do what. Advance Purchase is hopelessly misnamed - interview a hundred passengers and ask them to define off-peak.

When I drive somewhere, I don’t need to search on the internet for cheap slots onto and off the dual carriageway at fixed times several weeks in advance, yet with rail fares we increasingly believe we have to. The convenience of using the railway is becoming seriously out of kilter with its main competitor.

Advance Purchase as it is today must be abolished. Single-leg pricing, service quality-weighted prices per mile by Government region, a standard definition of peak/off-peak, and a universal Railcard would clarify and simplify things.

Gareth, Newtown Station Travel