Weekday engineering to make leisure travel easier?
LNER Managing Director David Horne has urged the industry to adopt a more collaborative and customer-focused mindset in its response to the Coronavirus pandemic.
He told RAIL’s National Rail Recovery Conference that despite the revenue challenges posed by long-term changes to commuter flows and a possible modal shift towards private cars, rail “has a bright future and is uniquely placed to help Britain build back better”.
His optimism is based on the strong growth in leisure and discretionary travel that is being widely anticipated by LNER and other operators.
Horne’s view is at least partly based on research conducted by LNER last autumn, which suggests that 24% of people intend to go on more ‘staycations’, 20% are reconsidering their use of air travel, and that 33% are looking to increase their use of trains.
He stressed that this would be aided by an industry drive to introduce new measures such as longer booking horizons for tickets, and for engineering to be increasingly rescheduled away from the traditional period of weekends and bank holidays.
“We must also attract new customers by bringing down traditional barriers to travel and by changing the perception that rail is not on the side of the customer,” he added.
Horne (pictured) said that LNER has identified the three biggest perceived barriers to travel as being overpriced and inflexible ticketing, overcrowded trains, and a lack of reliability and punctuality.
While punctuality and overcrowding are issues that have largely disappeared during the pandemic, owing to the introduction of a reduced timetable and a booking-only system by several operators, Horne said that much more pan-industry work is required in the area of fares and ticketing.
LNER has already made its own efforts to address this by introducing single-leg pricing on three of its routes since January 2020.
Horne also pointed to other initiatives from LNER designed to improve the customer experience, such as a trial for at-seat ordering