Monday 24 December 2007

50p admin charge for fast ticket printing

The trainline has introduced a 50p charge for printing out (at a fast ticket machine) tickets ordered on line. There's no self printing of tickets (or at least it's very limited) and of course the fast ticket reference can't be used directly (like on airlines), so the charge seems to be a disincentive to use the system. Railcard holders can get a zone 1-6 one day travelcard foe £4.80 (2007 prices) - the 50p charge is equivalent to a mark up of over 10%.

2 comments:

Jonathan said...

You can get round the charge by using the site of one of the national rail operators instead of thetrainline. All the same tickets, but without the charges.

For Travelcards, do you need to buy them via thetrainline? Surely there's no discount for buying in advance? I just buy mine direct from the FastTicket machine - no need to enter the long alphanumeric code either!

h2oz7v said...

Yep, I'm no longer buying from thetrainline.com because of this.

Just order from http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ and pick a different provider at the "purchase tickets" point (I use FGW)