Fare Dealer
RAIL fares expert Barry Doe looks at the problems presented by misunderstood fares clusters.
I have heard from a reader who told me he had been overcharged on his journey from Sandhurst to Reading. He travelled in a group, and their GroupSave fare was clearly based on £7.00 for the Off-Peak Day Return.
However, the National Rail Journey Planner had said it was only £6.30, so he queried it on arrival at Reading. He was told the correct fare was £7.00, so he took it up with Great Western Railway’s Customer Services.
GWR told him to go back to Reading to sort it out - a quite disgraceful attitude. Reading then told him to complain to Customer Services, and when he said it was they who had told him to come back to Reading, the ticket office immediately gave him refunds back to the lower fare.
Neither Customer Services nor the particular ticket-office staff at Reading come out of this well. Clearly neither seems to know their job.
There are two sets of fares on the fares database. One (unrouted) quotes the relevant Day Return as £6.30, whereas the other quotes £7.00 saying it’s “any permitted”.
The only permitted route between Sandhurst and Reading is the direct route anyway, so why is a higher “any permitted” fare shown?
I took this up with GWR’s pricing manager, who gave me a full explanation. There should indeed only be one set of fares, and our reader should have been charged £6.30.
It is connected with fares clusters, and to make it simple I’ll take a hypothetical example.
To simplify the process of setting fares throughout the country, principal stations are allocated ‘clusters’ of local stations.
Let’s say you have a major station A, and within (say) ten miles of A there are six smaller stations A1-A6. Now take another major station B to the south of A, with B also having six stations within ten miles - B1-B6.
Instead of having to calculate fares from the seven stations A & A1-A6 to B & B1-B6 (that’s 49 sets of fares in all), you only price from A to B. Those fares then apply to all the other possible journeys, such as A2 to B4.
Providing A and B are far enough apart, this doesn’t distort things. However, say A and B were only 50 miles apart. If A1 is furthest north and B6 is the furthest south, then A1 to B6 might be 70 miles. However, if A6 is south of A and B1 north of B, A6 to B1 might only be 30 miles.
Clearly clusters can’t work when they’re that close, and so separate fares are then calculated for all possible journeys.
Turning to our reader’s case, Sandhurst is part of the Farnborough cluster and the “any permitted” OP Day Return from Farnborough to Reading is £7. But it’s felt that Sandhurst should have a cheaper direct fare and so it is separately priced at £6.30.
Now, the fares system should suppress cluster-to-cluster fares from being shown as soon as there is a separate fare between any two stations inside the cluster, so the £7 fare should not appear under Sandhurst.
GWR explained to me that there are quite a few instances of duplicate fares around the network that arose a few years back when some technical changes were made. The higher fares are having to be manually removed - and it’s a lengthy task.
In the meantime, journey planners seem to cope automatically, and the errors only occur where ticket offices (or guards) are concerned. GWR told me that staff have been told that where two sets of local fares still exist, they should use their common sense and only ever charge the cheaper, direct fare.
I have checked the National Rail and GWR’s own journey planners and they both show £6.30. However, a ticket machine will definitely show both sets of fares, and this is where it all falls down in that the user has to make the choice.
Even looking at the excellent brfares.com site you immediately see both fares - and it’s even worse with the peak, Anytime Day Return, with a £10.20 “any permitted” fare appearing above the correct £8.70 option.
As we’ve seen, if Reading ticket office doesn’t understand the rules, what hope does the public have when buying from a ticket machine?
This can’t be sorted soon enough.