Buying your rail ticket online could cost you nearly double
An SRTA investigation has revealed that the key National Rail Enquiries website is was not quoting the cheapest fares from Sevenoaks to London on 30 December and in the New Year. Fares from some other Southeastern stations are wrong too. Passengers who buy their tickets online for off-peak travel could have been paying 88% more than they need.
A simple enquiry from one of our members about off-peak ticket validity during this week’s diverted services has led to SRTA uncovering incorrect and misleading information on the key National Rail Enquiries website: for Sevenoaks to London only the peak “anytime” fares are quoted for today – and also for normal service days like Tuesday 12 January – even though cheaper off-peak tickets are available as normal. If you select the fare you are taken to the Southeastern website with an Anytime ticket already selected for purchase.
National Rail Enquiries’ assurance that £21.80 is the cheapest fare for the 0957 Sevenoaks to Victoria (for instance) is wrong: an offpeak fare of £11.60 is valid. Passengers relying on the NRE website and buying their tickets online would be overcharged £10.20. That’s 88% – nearly double.
The same ticket mis-selling applies to some other stations, including Dartford.
This is not the first time National Rail Enquiries have been caught quoting higher than necessary fares and claiming that they are the cheapest. Last year the SRTA reported on a fares rip-off associated with engineering work and the London Bridge rebuilding.
Southeastern’s response now is that “Passengers will be able to buy off peak tickets from machines and the ticket office”. But that misses the point: passengers may already have bought the wrong tickets online. In addition, if they tell the ticket office explicitly that they want an “anytime” ticket then the ticket office are under no obligation to offer them the off-peak alternative.
Southeastern later said that “If customers have been overcharged they can claim the money back”. But how will customers know that they have been overcharged? And who would they claim the money back from?
To be fair to Southeastern the same fare enquiry directly to their own website does correctly offer and sell off-peak fares for off-peak trains – although that raises the question of why different rail industry websites are using different fare tables and rules, and how mere passengers could know which fare would be accepted by a Revenue Protection Officer.
After SRTA’s intervention National Rail Enquiries said last night that they were looking into the problem, but this morning at 0900 the incorrect and misleading ticket pricing was still given.
Incidentally other SRTA members have questioned why there are peak fares at all this week when Southeastern are offering, at best, only a diverted Saturday service. This is what Southeastern say:
“Our normal weekday off-peak ticket restrictions will apply on the ‘working’ days – Tuesday 29, Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 December. As with the vast majority of public transport providers, Southeastern’s off-peak ticket restrictions are in place in order to protect capacity for those who need to travel at the busiest times. Ticket restrictions are not related to the level of service provided on any particular day.”
Update (1030 31 December): Although neither National Rail Enquiries nor Southeastern have said anything or explained what had gone wrong, the NRE Journey Planner now seems to be quoting off-peak fares correctly. It remains to be seen whether this is a full fix, or whether the problem will re-occur. We will be keeping our eye on it!
As at 1030 on 30 December, National Rail are now saying that the Cheapest Fare is a FIRST CLASS Off Peak Return at £17.50 !
Funny how these blunders are never in the passenger’s favour…
The First Class Off-Peak return is offered if you select both Standard and First Class fares in “Show the Cheapest”. In addition, if you select “with Travelcard” then the correct Travelcard prices are offered according to the time of day. So the National Rail Enquiries system seems to know about off-peak periods – it just does not know that there are any Standard-class off-peak rail-only fares from Sevenoaks and some other stations.
A website blunder in the passenger’s favour would probably lead to a ticket that would not pass the gates or stand scrutiny from the Revenue Protection Officers.
It turns out that National Rail are fully aware that their website is ripping off passengers ! An honest company would suspend the ticket selling facility the moment they knew of any malfunction, but National Rail only hint that there’s a problem if you happen to click on the Status icon.
Even then, the notification is hopelessly vague. It says merely that ‘Fares for this journey may be showing incorrectly’, with no warning that passengers will be massively overcharged by being offered only The Wrong Kind Of Ticket.
That’s the “fix” introduced after last year’s fares rip-off!
You will notice that the (well-hidden) “warning” does not appear on the incorrect fares for Tuesday 12 January – see http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/timesandfares/SEV/London/120116/0915/dep/120116/1400/dep – and does not appear on the incorrect fares for the trains today unaffected by the London Bridge work (for instance the xx00 and xx30 Thameslink services to Blackfriars). It may be that National Rail Enquiries think that the problem only affects the special timetable – it doesn’t
Another National Rail rip-off is that they are still happily quoting their 0871 Train Tracker Premium Rate number (charged at up to 57p per minute), without even the Ofcom price warning that would be required if its use hadn’t been banned over 18 months ago !
http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/ldbboard/dep/SEV
http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/southeastern/sumdep.aspx?T=SEV&R=1
It really is time that the “National Conditions of Carriage” were consigned to the circular floor-mounted filing cabinet, and that the rail operators became subject to standard consumer protection legislation. Not that that would help much with understaffed Trading Standards departments only actioning really gross violations, if you’re lucky.
It’s all just like the Bad Old Days when hospital kitchens could avoid food hygiene regulations by dint of “Crown Immunity”
@mike: It seems that the Department for Transport have been “consulting” – very quietly – on proposals to extend for a further eight years the UK rail industry exemption from the EU Minimum Standards for Rail Passenger Rights – https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/rail-passengers-rights-and-obligations
The DfT’s so-called “consultation” is straight out of “Yes, Prime Minister”.
It was so Top Secret that it attracted just 31 responses, of whom a mere seven were private individuals.
And a year later they’re still “analysing your feedback” !