I was charged a fortune for train tickets at the station – but my last-minute trick saved me 50 per cent off fare
EVERY day rail passengers in the UK are caught out by train station ticket machines charging much more for tickets than it costs to book them online.
I was very nearly one of those people earlier this week, when I landed at Gatwick Airport.
I arrived at the train station ticket machine before, which informed me that my ticket into London was going to cost £28, which didn’t seem right.
My train to the airport for my outward journey, which I’d booked using a ticketing app, had cost just £13, so I was baffled by the increase in price.
I got my phone out to check the ticketing app again and was surprised to see that the very same ticket I was trying to buy from the ticket machine was just £13 online – £15 cheaper than buying it at the station.
I ordered it on my phone and collected my tickets from the very same ticketing machine that would have charged me more than double what I had just paid.
I got on my train feeling like I’d dodged a bullet – but not everyone is as fortunate.
In fact, new figures revealed by consumer champion Which? show that some train station ticket machines are charging as much as 154 per cent more than ticketing websites and apps.
After sending mystery shoppers to 15 different stations – each run by a different train operator – and checking the prices of 75 journeys from a ticket machines against the price available from the UK’s biggest ticket site, Trainline, they came to the same conclusion.
Their results showed that that fares purchased online were cheaper around three-quarters of the time, and on average, same day journeys cost a hefty 52 per cent more from machines.
One of their shoppers found that a ticket from Holmes Chapel in Cheshire to London cost 154 per cent more from the station’s ticket machine, compared with buying online. For that route, the machine charged £66 against Trainline’s £26 split-ticket option.
Similarly, someone buying a same day, one-way ticket from Northampton to Cardiff would have paid £107 for their ticket from the machine, 148 per cent more than buying online, where the price was just £43.
Which? also found the services offered by different ticket machines could vary significantly, with passengers often facing restricted choice and as a result, higher prices.
One of the key reasons why tickets from machines are often more expensive is because most don’t offer ‘advance’ fares, cheaper tariffs which are available for buying in advance of travel.
Some machines may also lead to passengers unwittingly missing out on cheaper fares. At first glance, many machines visited by the mystery shoppers didn’t appear to sell off-peak tickets at peak times.
One mystery shopper visited Hitchin first thing in the morning and looked for a one-way ticket to York later that day, but could only buy an anytime single, priced at £133, even though the time they would be travelling would qualify for an off-peak fare.
The same journey could be booked through Trainline for just £55 off-peak, with the added advantage of using split ticketing to cut the cost.
Great Northern, the train operator responsible for the machines at Hitchin, said off-peak tickets for same-day travel could be found by selecting the ‘tickets for future travel’ button on the machine’s homepage.
However, many travellers are likely to be caught out by this quirk, given future travel is usually considered to apply to a date in the future.
Rory Boland, Editor of Which? Travel, said: “The price differences we found between booking online and using station ticket machines were simply astounding.
“Millions of tickets are purchased using ticket machines every year, meaning that huge numbers of us are potentially paying significantly more than we need to when we commute to work or visit friends and family across the country.
“Wherever possible we’d recommend booking train tickets online for the cheapest options, but that won’t be possible for everyone.
“Significant numbers of elderly people don’t have internet access at all – leaving them with little choice but to run the gauntlet of ticket machines which either don’t offer the best prices, or make it difficult to find the appropriate fares.”
I was lucky enough to avoid a hefty price hike from the ticket machines, but not everyone knows to double check or shop around.
But it’s always worth getting your phone out and making sure you’re getting the best price you can when buying train tickets.
Meanwhile, this is the exact date rail fares are set to rise this year.
And this is why train tickets are so expensive in the UK.
