| Product: |
thetrainline.com |
| Date: |
17/06/09 (33 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: You can often get very good prices on your tickets
Disadvantages: Slow web pages/crashing, prices seem to be updated by intersest
I've bought tickets everal times using the Trainline
I often find it highly frustrating as for some reason my computer often crashes on this site - not sure why but I'm not here to argue about that
We bought tickets about 6 months ago so that my partner's son could travel down from Coventry for a week, and boy was it hard. It wasn't hard to book a ticket what was, was the fact that we visited the site over a few days (as I was waiting to pay on my next credit card statement), but as we were trying to find cheap tickets I couldn't believe that the prices kept fluctuating, and it was actually cheaper changing at Reading rather than Birmingham. In fact the ticket we bought was £20, and due to a train breakdown he actually used the Birmingham route which was quicker and what was going to cost us nearly £80.
We booked tickets again a week ago to visit London at the beginning of August, yet within 24 hours we were limited to only a handful of trains to get there and back for £13 each. The next cheapest price was £30+ a bit excessive seeing we were booking so far in advance.
The biggest problem we had though was the refreshing of the pages when we tried to change train times to find the best deals, they were often slow and occasionally just froze.
The good bit is that they are fast and reliable when sending out tickets, and you can if you wish collect them from your local railway station with your credit card.
I have mixed opinions with this site, and thus why I've given it the 4 star rating.
Summary: A good way of getting good deals on your rail tickets
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Last comment:
 |
- 18/06/09 Hi Chris,
Just wanted to help you with some of the issues you seemed to experience while trying to book train tickets.
All rail booking sites access the National Reservation System which provides the availability of the cheaper advance tickets allocated by the train operators. Also be aware that it is the train operators that dictate the ticket prices and not the online retailers.
Similar to airlines, the availability of these fares can fluctuate as they are quota controlled by the operator and not by the rail booking retailing sites such as thetrainline.com. And if this reservation system is experiencing issues, which is sometimes does, it means that booking sites will have problems recalling and displaying the fares to customers.
The best thing to do to ensure you can secure a cheap ticket is to book as far in advance as possible. Cheap tickets are available up to 12 weeks in advance and you can still make a saving on an advance ticket if you book the day before travel before 6pm.
Some great gadgets are available on thetrainline.com to help customers get the cheapest tickets, such as ticket alert which you can sign up to and they will email you as soon as cheap tickets become available for your specified journey www.thetrainline.com/tick etalert
You can also try out best fare finder that helps you find the cheapest tickets for your journey around the dates you are looking to travel on www.thetrainline.com/fare finder
thetrai nline.com are also rolling out thier new website which is much more user friendly and which categorises and highlights the cheapest tickets to customers. The new website is in beta and is available at www.thetrainline.com/buyt ickets
Also, you're right that there are savings to be made by taking different routes, and you can also save by 'split ticketing' which means if you book two tickets e.g. London-Reading, Reading-Coventry rather than booking one direct ticket London-Coventry; although it takes a bit of patience and time to find the right routes.
Hope this helps.
Paul |
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