Where would this leave the practice of split ticketing?
“Split ticketing is the elephant in the room,” says Hewitson. “It damages trust in the railway. It shouldn’t be down to the individual to know how the system works to get the best deal.”
Adds Steer: “It is completely pointless. It is a huge loophole caused by a system set by individual operators, which creates massive anomalies. We have to strip it out.”
Doe comments: “If I asked a ticket clerk for the cheapest fare, I’m likely to be offered the cheapest through fare, which may not be the same thing at all. But if I asked for all the different permutations to uncover the genuinely lowest fare, the queue would soon be backing up out of the door.”
Hewitson adds: “The classic one is on the Great Western. If you’re going to Cardiff but you change tickets at Didcot, you can save a lot. Didcot was in the pre-privatisation London & South East area, and ended up with a different pricing structure.
“If you’re in the know you can get a good deal. But how does a business engender trust if its customers are not sure they have been sold the right thing?”
Several websites now specialise in split ticketing. Passengers could use www.splityourticket.co.uk, www.splitmyfare.co.uk, www.faresaver.org, www.splitticketing.com, www.moneysavingexpert.com or download the Ticketysplit app.
“Some of the websites really do work,” says Doe. “But it brings the railway into disrepute. People who understand split ticketing can pay less than people who don’t know how to manipulate the system. It is not fair.
“East Coast tried to iron out split ticketing by using the element of “flex” allowed under the annual increase in capped fares. But now the Government has abolished flex. Passengers rightly saw it as a ruse by train operators to shove up the costs on the most profitable parts of a route. But the side-effect is that it locks in the benefits of split ticketing.”
Mapp explains: “Split ticketing is unique to the British market because of its combination of market pricing and regulation. It exists because of the difference between the way train companies price long and short-distance travel. That would be fine if short-distance tickets only worked on short distance journeys, but because the regulations require them to be inter-available, it creates split ticketing. It is an unintended consequence.
“It has been there since the 1970s. The only reason it has now become more commonly understood is because technology has made it easier for people to calculate split ticket combinations.
“Our view is that it is extremely confusing for customers. We cannot really have a national industry with its fares policy determined by fares anomalies. It has to come back to the common sense approach that fares are set at the level that the market will bear.”
Steer argues that only Government can clear this up. And unless change is imposed, he says, it will never happen.
“The more you take away the right of individual franchises to set fares, the more you diminish their ability to pursue the private sector theme of maximising returns to shareholders. Eliminating the annual flex has put a further constraint on them.
“Operators have all kinds of choices and in the current system they are essential. Change that, and the nature of franchising would take a further nudge towards them becoming concessions instead of franchises. They would be running trains within an agreed fare network.”
In 2013, Transport Scotland changed its ticketing structure to get rid of split ticketing and bought out some of the anomalies. It promised to recompense ScotRail for potential loss of revenue, which enabled it to take away 1,500 of the main splits.
“It comes at a cost - they are sometimes selling a cheaper ticket than before,” says PF’s Hewitson. “But in return it boosted trust and confidence. People don’t like buying a ticket and then finding the person in the next seat has bought the same thing for less.”
Transport Scotland said it meant cheaper fares for 275,000 journeys and that one end-to-end ticket would almost always be at least 50p cheaper than two separate tickets for the same journey.
Launching it, Scottish Transport Minister Keith Brown said: “Passengers had to navigate their way through a database. That’s not what we want. We want a fares system that is quick and easy to use.”
CBT’s Joseph says: “The proof lies in London. When national rail was added to the Oyster card, Transport for London had to make all sorts of guarantees that revenue losses would be underwritten.
“The operators had confidently predicted they would lose money. But national rail saw revenue growth of 8% in a year. Simplifying the system made more people in London want to use public transport.
“That doesn’t get picked up in the DfT appraisal system because it isn’t shaped to recognise network growth benefits. Simple offers to people matter and so far Government has made a complete hash of it.”
Joseph suggests a regional zonal card could make sense in Bristol, where funding for a metro system is now in place, with bulldozers lining up to work. He says it would now be unimaginable to have a city-based regional metro without one.
“I think the rail industry’s current stance is going to be overwhelmed, actually. I think it will just have to do this stuff.”
Could this be part of the ticketing review being carried out by the Office of Rail Regulation? It issued a consultation document in October, with a report due next summer.
Ann Eggington, head of competition and consumer policy, says: “We are trying to establish whether there is sufficient incentive on train operators to collaborate for the benefit of consumers. Or is the governance itself dampening the process, because of the processes attached to them? For example, why do we still have paper tickets, and why do we still have problems with ticket machines?”
Steer is dismissive: “ORR will just tamper with it. The system will get even more complex without tackling the underlying problem. Someone has to admit that the system is broken and order it to be fixed. I don’t see that happening at the moment.
“Politicians have to feel there is sufficient benefit in doing it. But they shy away from it. I can’t understand what is unappealing about it, apart from the effort it will take to achieve.”
How do other countries tackle the walk-on versus pre-booked question?
The ‘go-to’ person for European advice is The Man in Seat 61. Mark Smith runs a website (www.seat61.com) to guide international rail travellers and he knows his onions - a former customer relations manager for train operators, he then went to the Office of the Rail Regulator and then the Strategic Rail Authority, ending up at the Department for Transport running the team regulating fares.
“In the UK we have a more commercially aggressive system. We have cheaper advance fares than other European countries and we have much more expensive full-flex long-distance fares for business travel. The Europeans sat there with big government subsidies and no commercial imperative to increase revenue. They are following in our wake, but they are at least ten years behind us.”
Smith divides European long-distance ticketing systems into two groups: countries that operate a flexible walk-on long-distance system; and countries that operate airline-style booking in which every ticket comes with a seat reservation.
Spain, Italy and France operate like airlines, with every ticket for a single specific train. If you want to travel an hour earlier or later, you have to visit a ticket office to change your reservation.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands operate as the UK does, with open tickets that can be used on any train and with reservation an optional extra.
“The basic ethos with us is that you can get on any train,” says Smith. “We suffer overcrowding because on this system you will always get a mismatch between demand and available seats. You have a lower average load factor on UK trains - 40% - because it’s a walk-up railway.
“Some people say you should be guaranteed a seat on a train. Be careful what you wish for: the only way to do that is to switch to the French or Spanish model where every ticket has a reservation, where you can’t just hop on a later train.
“Virgin and East Coast have invested in airline-style yield management technology. So the reservation system could handle the varying of prices if the change was wanted. But in the UK the fully flexible ticket is seen as a key advantage of travelling by train, and I don’t think we would want to change that.”
