Train swap from Crosscountry Trains

[whole diary]

[Mark A]

Allows the traveller to switch an advance ticket on one train to a different train that has capacity - but on that journey a rice bowl has to be filled. Would it be good if the rice bowl belonged to the railway, and would it be even better if the national ticketing system handled the task in house with the cost wrapped into the initial advance booking payment.

Mark

https://www.crosscountrytrains.co.uk/special-offers/our-offers/train-swap

[Ralph Ayres]

Rice bowl? Not a term I'm familiar with and Google was no help!

Looks like you have to pay an admin fee, any new seat availability is subject to demand and I'm guessing the price may be more anyway.  Doesn't all that already exist?

Annoying use of terminology in the FAQ^▸ (Frequently Asked Questions) about tickets not working automatic gates. Apparently I've got to talk to a "colleague" at the station, which is unhelpful if I'm not travelling with anyone I work with!  In practice it won't even be one of their own staff as Cross-Country don't run any stations, so it's not even their colleague.

[Mark A]

Thinking about it, I'm hoping the 'Rice bowl' phrase isn't racist - I intended it to reference systems in which, in order to get a simple task done, it's necessary to fork out for a series of other tasks that can be somewhat distant/irrelevant to the primary but which generate space for a galaxy of people to make a living. It's not ok to throw that shade at parts of the world where rice is a staple of the diet though. It's easy to suspect that all societies might tend to evolve such practices though.

Mark

[rogerw]

I changed an advance ticket with GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) yesterday - senior moment. booked wrong date. A simple process and a reasonable charge. It helped that I had booked on line so could access the original booking.

[TaplowGreen]

I changed an advance ticket with GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) yesterday - senior moment. booked wrong date. A simple process and a reasonable charge. It helped that I had booked on line so could access the original booking.

I wonder how much it costs GWR to change the booking, compared to how much they charged you?

[grahame]

... would it be good if the rice bowl belonged to the railway, and would it be even better if the national ticketing system handled the task in house with the cost wrapped into the initial advance booking payment.

Hmmm ... if you add flexibility to advance purchase "this train only" tickets, are you not encouraging people to move away from the more expensive flexible tickets, to the detriment of the overall rail industry income?   There's an argument for selling "this train only" tickets to provide more economic travel to people who can go at unpopular times, but you start adding change options on to that and it gets confused. 

I noted this in the publicity:

The power is in your hands. Swap the original departure time of your CrossCountry Advance train ticket, to one on the same day, that better suits your new plans. Swaps are open one day in advance and up to 15 minutes before departure, just ‘Swap & Go’. You can head home early, or stick around until closing time, it’s up to you. With Train Swap, you’re always in control of your journey.

It talks about it being CrossCountry, and perhaps they run trains up until closing time - but that still wouldn't work for me on a GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) advance / swapped ticket if I stuck around in London until closing time ... last train 21:30 which is much much better than it was, but I'm not in control ... can't get home like apparently I could with Cross Country