I tried to buy train tickets to get to the CEP Conference on the 26th today.
Last week they had tickets for £13 each way on Trainline but this week they’re not available. The cheapest tickets available at the moment from Telford to London are more than a return from Edinburgh which takes the piss so I phoned the national rail enquiry line who put me on to Virgin.
I told the woman at Virgin that I wanted to be there in the morning, I don’t care what time within reason and come back in the evening. She told me the cheapest they could do were £13 each way and they were heavily discounted because they are only available for advance bookings.
Marvellous. I’m giving 25 days notice so I’d like the tickets. Ah, they can’t sell me the tickets because they’re not available yet. I have to ring back in a week and see if they’re available.
WTF? And they wonder why people don’t use public transport.
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And they cant tell you when they will be availbe either?
It’s a bit of a con… there will only be limited tickets at that price!
Just be thankful you don’t have to travel to London on a Sunday, it almost impossible!
They said they couldn’t tell me but I have my doubts. Personally I reckon it’s a pretty good scam but there is no way I’m paying more for a ticket from Telford to London than I would if I was traveling from from Edinburgh.
Forget about the Edinburgh link. Cheap prices are offered (probably at Edinburgh too), they make you phone up nearer the time. What is really happening is this, if they haven\’t got the places filled when you phone, they will sell them for that price.
Never use the Trainline. They own qjump as well, yet qjump often have cheaper fares. They’ve clearly used advertising to push people on Trainline in the hope that they won’t search for cheaper tickets.
LfaT, that’s actually a very common marketing ploy and it’s very effective. My uncle is a mechanic and he used to sell tyres from his garage. I went down for tyres once and he gave me three different prices. All three were the same tyre made by the same company in the same factory with different brand names on them. I naively asked why and it’s simply because people looing for budget tyres won’t pay more than, say, £20 for a tyre, some will pay more because they don’t want the budget tyres but think the expensive ones are a rip-off and some people will pay through the nose for tyres because they think money means quality. The tyres are the same but they get to sell to all three groups of people.
It’s like that with finance companies – I used to work for one. Apply for finance with one company and get refused and they pass your details on to another finance company in the same group with less stringent criteria who might give you the loan. Sometimes they’ll pass it on to 3 or 4 different companies in the same group until one of them will accept the risk. The money comes from the same company but it’s marketing the product at different demographics.
No, edinburgh is a good example, it is a big town in the north, that everyone has heard of.
We have deals like that up here too and they never know when the cheap tickets will be availble, there is an enquiry goiing through holyrood at the moment about these cheap prices basically it will mean they cannot promise non spefic stuff at indterminate times, they will have to say, where and when it will be availble
The margins in the tyre business are actually very small. Michelin/Pirelli make less than 3% on a distributed tyre, fact, sorry. Think of scale of economies and you might be closer! The re-branded branded tyres have subtle, yet marked, differences in terms of quality and effectiveness (water dispersal/traction) whilst maintaining safety.