Pocket money... two more tips to cut train costs
⬤ It’s not just railcards that are needlessly hard to understand – the entire booking system is poorly understood. There’s no other explanation for why so many people pay fees to book tickets through sites such as Trainline when you can get tickets for any train company fee-free via any of the other train companies, not just the one you are travelling on.
Many of these firms have well-designed websites and apps, such as LNER and GWR. Some run regular cashback offers through various credit cards: LNER’s current offers range from 12% on some American Express cards to 5% on cards from multiple other banks such as Lloyds, Halifax and Barclaycard. Cashback offers are time limited, but some train firms let you buy vouchers that can be used to pay for tickets at a later date – a potentially useful way to lock in a discount even if you can’t book the ticket before your credit-card offer expires.
A handful of train operators also offer some form of loyalty scheme. For example, LNER gives 2% credit on bookings for its own trains, while bookings via Transport for Wales for any trains can earn Avios air miles if you access it through British Airways’ shopping portal.
⬤ Splitting tickets can be a useful way to find lower fares, although examples of the immense value of this trick for certain routes greatly overstate the savings that you’re likely to make on a typical journey. Splitting a ticket involves buying two or more tickets, with one to an intermediate station and the other from that station to your destination.
This can work out cheaper, either due to the strange ways in which tickets are priced, the ability to use a railcard for part of the journey, or the chance to break a ticket into peak and offpeak segments. The train you travel on must stop at the intermediate station, but you don’t need to get off.
There are now multiple sites that calculate split tickets, many of which are powered by the same engine. They charge a percentage of the saving if you book via them, which you may consider a fair payment for a useful service not available elsewhere – but if not, you can use their results to book the same tickets directly with a train firm. No single site is always better at finding the best price than others, but tickets.railforums.co.uk helps support a website that is a useful source of advice and information on train travel.