Another Travel Centre Facing the Axe

[whole diary]

[Timmer]

First we hear that SWT^▸ (South West Trains) are planning to close the travel Centre at Weymouth, now we read in today's Western Daily Press that Salisbury travel centre could also close. All so SWT can save money to pay their premium to run the franchise. Sad.

http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=146238&command=displayContent&sourceNode=146064&contentPK=19301600&folderPk=100268&pNodeId=145795

[Lee]

More in the link below.
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4446.msg8211#msg8211

[grahame]

I think they're only keeping one of their travel centres open ...

[Lee]

I think they're only keeping one of their travel centres open ...

London Waterloo.

[Graz]

Travel centres are a friendly, quiet place for passengers to discuss travel arrangements with professional staff. Who'd want to stand at a ticket booth trying to ask about train times and fares with a long queue of fed-up people behind you? I really condemn any closure of these places, just like at Bath Spa recently.

I also wish TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) like FGW^▸ (First Great Western) and SWT^▸ (South West Trains) would stop citing ticket machines as the 'be all and end all' ticketing solution. I've had so many serious issues with them for not reading a debit card, rejecting all notes people try to put in and rejecting money for being 25p over. I would much prefer to buy advance tickets from someone I could talk to so that they could give me advice on train times, etc. In fact, I would much prefer to buy normal tickets from an office!

[Timmer]

Travel centres are a friendly, quiet place for passengers to discuss travel arrangements with professional staff. Who'd want to stand at a ticket booth trying to ask about train times and fares with a long queue of fed-up people behind you? I really condemn any closure of these places, just like at Bath Spa recently.

Losing the Bath Spa travel centre was a big blow and a poor decision for tourist city such as Bath. Towards the end though it was often manned by only one person 'due to staff shortages'. I wonder how much longer it will be before they close the one at Bristol as well.

[BandHcommuter]

I seem to remember Network South East closing these very same travel centres in the early 1990s, and they were later reopened by South West Trains. There seems to be a certain circularity in a lot of things in the railway industry!

I guess the difficulty for traditional ticket retailers now is the easy availability of tickets through other means. Personally, I only visit the ticket office once a year to buy my season (and I could do it by post). I buy advance purchase tickets through the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) website, and pick them up from the ticket machine. I understand that some operators will soon be offering self-print and mobile phone ticketing. All very convenient. The trend will be for ticket offices/travel centres to be left with those customers who are unable to use internet or self service facilities, and those with more complex, time-consuming journeys to plan. It appears that operators are seeking to minimise the costs of providing these residual facilities.

[vacman]

I'm sure it won't be long before they introduce a self sevice ticket machine that you can go and buy advance purchase tickets from! wouldn't be rocket science, just put in the dates you want to travel and it shows you the available tickets! There's no substitute for actually talking to someone in an office though.

[swlines]

Sadly - this has been known for a while.

As mentioned above, all travel centres are closing on the SWT^▸ (South West Trains) network except London Waterloo. This is mainly due to the advent of online ticketing services such as TheTrainLine and "MixingDeck" (the GNER^▸ (Great North Eastern Railways)/NXEC^▸ (National Express East Coast) solution). As a result, there is a lack of revenue going to the travel centres and as such their position is not commercially viable.

The ironic thing is, while SWT are closing the travel centres, they aren't introducing ToD to their ticket machines....

[vacman]

Very strange? FGW^▸ (First Great Western) introduce TOD on most of their machines, when they actually work anyway.

[swlines]

Quite.

I now quote a message from SWT^▸ (South West Trains):

Our ticket vending machines are technically capable of offering
the 'ticket of departure' functionality used in many parts of the
rail network. However, our business   is substantially different
to most of the train operators who offer ticket on departure and
as such, our current retail strategy is to sell tickets at
stations. We do this by supplementing ticket offices with the
biggest fleet of ticket vending machines operating on the National
Rail Network. We will be expanding this further during 2008 with
installation of nearly 200 more machines.
 
We do periodically assess the customer service and commercial
benefits of ticket on departure, and of course will implement it
if our policy changes.

Avoidance tactics there.