If I am booking train journeys I go to my local station. If the person there is in a helpful mood they can work the system for you to get the best price. They can sell you tickets for any journey in the country not just from that station. Dealing with someone in an Indian call centre who does not know where the stations are in relation to each other is a waste of time.

Just booked return rail travel for my mother from Suffolk to Northumberland in April.

I used trainline - standard return journey £72 - 2 single tickets with first class on the outward leg £41 in total!! If she had gone on a slightly later train then standard single tickets would have cost £10.50 each way! Ridiculous pricing structure - you really do have to work through all the possible alternatives when booking rail travel and they are supposed to have made it more straighforward. It is easier to book air tickets.

Pippa

If I am booking train journeys I go to my local station. If the person there is in a helpful mood they can work the system for you to get the best price. They can sell you tickets for any journey in the country not just from that station. Dealing with someone in an Indian call centre who does not know where the stations are in relation to each other is a waste of time.

Unfortunately many stations no longer have ticket offices and where they do the staff are not always as helpful as they could be which isn't really surprising given the queues they have to deal with.

I'm not quite sure where the Indian call centres come into things, you can book all you need online with either an agent or the individual train operators themselves.

It is easier to book air tickets.

Absolutely Pippa at least you know who goes from A to B. With the train companies overlapping on routes its a nightmare confirming whose offer is applicable to your journey. One operator offers a Group-saver over half term for £20 but with another its £41 even though the distance travelled is virtually the same.

Silverpixie might be saving money but setting the seed for future problems, you really need to know what you are doing before splitting a journey like that.

Firstly, the train has to stop at the station where you split the fare at - obviously with the change in London that will happen but in other cases it won't. If the train doesn't stop then technically you don't have a valid ticket for the section of the journey from the last stop before the break to the next one afterwards.

Second, if the journey involves crossing London, like Kent to Birmingham, the through fare should include the cost of transfer by Underground. Splitting the journey at London loses this benefit. Not got an Oyster card - then that'll be £8 return per person to add on to what you thought you were paying! In this case if you have to split then try getting one portion as a through ticket to "Zone 1 Underground" to see if it saves anything.

But where it can get really expensive is if things go wrong! Taking the Kent to London example, you set off for home and something goes wrong between Birmingham and London meaning you eventually arrive at Euston at 01:00. The train company is only liable to get you to where it says on the ticket you were using at the time (not the other one in your pocket). So if it says Birmingham to London once they deliver you to Euston you're not their problem any more. But if it says Birmingham to somewhere in Kent they still have to get you there - even if the last onward train has gone - so that will be a minicab at their cost not yours! This is basically the same rules as with airlines (and why the likes of easyjet never issue connecting through tickets!). Currently the southern end of West Coast line into Euston is one of the most unreliable in Europe - best of luck!!

You can also lose flexibilty on routes. There is a web forum specifically devoted to Splitting tickets and I saw a case on it a couple of weeks ago where someone found that instead of buying through ticket from Southampton to Liverpool it was much cheaper to split at Newport (South Wales). Very true! But the normal through ticket marked "Not via London" would be valid via Reading/ Oxford, or via Bristol/ Cheltenham in addition to the Newport route. So if his plans had changed (or something had gone wrong on one route) he would have had more options on services. I can think of worse places to get stuck at than Newport - but not many!!

There is one type of journey where splitting tickets can be worthwhile (as long as you are aware of the above pitfalls), Day return trips of between roughly 50 and 100 miles. About 50 miles has been the cut off for whether a return is valid for a day or longer for decades. The price per mile is often less for a day return because it is felt that a day trip has less overall value than a longer stay. So buying 2 day returns instead of one through ticket vaild for a month might give you a significant saving, especially if at least one is a Cheap Day (sorry, Off Peak)

If you want to get involved in Splitting you really need a good knowledge of railway geography and services and you need to know what might go wrong and how you would get yourself out of trouble.

And before you start checking out various combinations make sure you have checked for Advance fares. I left a post on the UK forum a couple of weeks ago with a link that explains when these are available. The fares are never quoted online until the reservation system has them loaded, which is usually 10-12 weeks in advance but at weekends could be less.

http://www.holidaytruths.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=130309

And it isn't the fare system that's more complicated than the airlines - it's the network. There are around 2500 stations on the British network - that means 6,250,000 possible journey combinations. Your average flight takes off, lands at one destination where everyone gets off and has no more than a few dozen onward destinations where through tickets can be issued to - assuming the airline will let you. It just looks simple because of that, if you look for a price quote on an airline that will allow through bookings (such as KLM or Lufthansa) you'll see that things can be very complicated.

Sorry that was a long rant but I can see where this is heading. Someone will dive in, split tickets to save £20 then get caught up in trouble and have to pay much more to get out - and who's fault will it be.............???

Normally I am booking group tickets for school trips. You can't do that online and have to call and speak to someone on the other side of the world!

Most Group Travel bookings are done within the train company's main office building at their HQ. You aren't calling the main National Rail enquiry number and asking to be put through are you - about half of their calls do go to India (where the staff have about as much British geographical knowledge as the average British school leaver - which is worrying whichever way you look at it!!).

The direct contact details for any Train Operating Company can be found at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/tocs_maps/tocs/ and click on a name. Group Travel is usually in the bottom half of the detail page.

steve8482 wrote:

Most Group Travel bookings are done within the train company's main office building at their HQ. You aren't calling the main National Rail enquiry number and asking to be put through are you - about half of their calls do go to India (where the staff have about as much British geographical knowledge as the average British school leaver - which is worrying whichever way you look at it!!).

The direct contact details for any Train Operating Company can be found at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/tocs_maps/tocs/ and click on a name. Group Travel is usually in the bottom half of the detail page.

I use the number from their website. Or rather I did until I found the staff at my local station were far better.

Steve, I had already figured in the tube fare by pricing from Kent to Euston and I've found that once I'd worked out my prices online a lovely lady at the National Rail enquiry line confirmed that my journey was possible although you can also check the route, including stations called at and the times, online.

I'm also happy to leave plenty of time for my connections if it means I save such a significant amount. A nice cup of coffee from my thermos watching the people rushing around the station is great, perhaps its because I love to travel.

Whenever I search for advanced fares for a direct journey I can only ever get a very cheap ticket one way so it doesn't usually work out any cheaper than the return, I don't suppose for a minute that's deliberate.

I'm awaiting Thetrainline's advanced ticket alert service for a future journey, it will be interesting to see if I can book cheap advanced singles both ways this time for the entire journey without having to split it.

I do appreciate this may not be for everyone but this forum has such intrepid travellers I thought it only right to point out the opportunity.

another way to benefit is to look at other stations up and down the route to get your tickets from and to.
also look at getting a Network rail card(or similar) if you travel regularly on trains. i save a third of my journeys. if you spend more than £72 a year you should benefit.
i flew from bournemouth a couple of times recently, and wanted to get my ticket to christchurch because its nearer the airport.i priced it up from my local station and it was cheaper to get a ticket to bournemouth and just get off at christchurch which the train passes through on its way to bournemouth .
i then discovered that if i bought my ticket(at my home town) from a station a couple of stops before mine all the way to bournemouth i could get a return for £13.15 instead of the £35 travelling along the south coast or even the £50+ if i travelled through London.
do your homework. it pays