Train Operating Companies Should Sell Rovers Online
Ranger and rover tickets are some of the greatest tickets you can buy on the railways in Britain. Some of them offer superb value for money and are valid to a great range of destinations so are really useful if you want to do a day of exploring. Rail enthusiasts use them as a cheap way to travel on a large number of trains, and tourists use them as a good way of travelling between lots of different attractions. But in my opinion, information about ranger and rover tickets is quite difficult to find, and they’re not that easy to purchase either. In this blog post I want to talk about some changes I think should be made.
The first change I would like to see is more publicity for ranger and rover tickets so people can find them more easily. The National Rail Enquiries website is often the first place passengers would look for this information, and it does have a rangers and rovers section. But I think it could do with some improvement. It currently sorts the rovers into alphabetical order which means unless you already know the name of the rover you probably won’t find it. An example of this is the “Explore Wales Pass” ticket – I wouldn’t automatically look under E for a ticket valid in Wales. I’d like to see this list sorted into locations, much like The Ranger Finder. This means people can search for rovers by clicking on the region they plan to visit.
The main change I’d like to see is more ranger and rover tickets being available for purchase online, just like most other travel tickets are. One company who is already good at this is Scotrail. You can purchase Freedom of Scotland Travelpasses, Highland Rovers and Central Scotland Rovers from their website. This makes finding out about the tickets and buying them much easier.
Train operating companies could incorporate rangers and rovers into their existing booking engines so that single, return, season, advance and ranger and rover tickets are displayed side-by-side in a similar way that London Travelcard fares are already displayed when booking a journey to the capital. When booking a single, return or advance fare, the booking engine could also suggest rovers available in that area at the checkout stage, much like they already do by offering passengers a Plusbus ticket. I think doing this would have a number advantages:
Train companies may benefit from increased revenue, as people would see more easily that these tickets are available and would be more likely to purchase them.
Some rover tickets are valid for a set number of days, such as 3 days in 7 or 4 days in 8. Passengers need to choose the dates they’re going to travel by completing a set of boxes before they travel. If tickets were sold online then there’s the possibility that these boxes could come completed ready based on the selection the passenger made online, and therefore reduce the number of people travelling with the date boxes left blank and therefore gaining extra days from their rover.
Passengers would benefit from being able to purchase ranger and rover tickets more easily, as they wouldn’t have to queue for them at the station. They would also be able to purchase their tickets before travelling, and therefore be able to get started on their travels more quickly. Some people might book advance tickets to a city location and then use a rover ticket when they arrive to explore the area. These passengers would benefit too because they wouldn’t have to buy another ticket when they arrive – they’d already have it.
On some journeys, a rover ticket is cheaper than the return fare. One example I’ve found is Hastings to Southampton Central via Barnham. The adult return fare is £15, but Southern offer a Daysave ticket for £12. A Daysave ticket is valid for unlimited travel on all Southern services in a day. As this journey is completed only using Southern’s services, it would be cheaper for people to buy the Daysave ticket. Obviously, the Daysave ticket has some extra restrictions (such as being valid at different times of day and not being valid on other operator’s services) and passengers should be told about these on screen when they purchase their ticket. But they should also be able to see the other things the rover ticket can be used for, as this may encourage them to make extra travel plans with that operator and therefore benefit the company even further.
I hope you can see my argument here for selling ranger and rover tickets online, and I’d like to invite you to make your own comments about it. With further ideas and suggestions maybe train operating companies and ticket retailers will consider this for the future? As its January 1st, I’d also like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a very happy new year too, and I’m looking forward to writing more for you in 2012.
Photograph: Chris Jeffery.
I can see your point, but…… if the TOCs hide away the rover tickets, people will buy more expensive tickets…… (ie a return to Southampton – if you’re going to Southampton from Hastings for the day, you’ll probably go by train if it’s only fifteen quid….. so that’s £3 straight on the TOCs bottom line profit).
This is a result of the TOCs being private companies – if they were nationalised, you’d probably have a much simpler ticketing system, but it would be less competitive. This is probably especially the case where a TOC has a pretty much “self contained” core area, as Southern do – they are competing with nobody for journeys over £12 in a lot of their area – so why make it easy to find a rover that will save the customer money. They would probably argue “all the information is there, if you want it”.
It would be good (but won’t happen – it can’t) if there was one place only that you could buy tickets. A national ticketing franchise. They would run the TVMs, the websites, the booking offices. They would be forced to tell you the absolute cheapest possible way of getting from A to B (via C, D and Q if you wanted), the cheapest time to travel (if you are flexible) and this would include any rover tickets, half term promotions, options to make it cheaper by, for example, buying a Network Railcard, if you were wanting to buy a ticket for the next twenty Saturdays. At the moment there is obviously such a low incentive to do wheel out the rover tickets, they are just there as a kind of token gesture, if you can find them.
@Steve Pilfold: Thanks for adding your own point of view, I can see what you mean. You bringing up the points of a simpler ticketing system made me think of the whole tickets by the mile argument, I might cover that in a future post.