Hidden Cheaper Tickets (Virgin Trains)

Member Name: Whitehorse

Product:	Virgin Trains
Date:	02/07/02 (1776 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheaper Tickets

Disadvantages: You have to know where to look!

I absolutely hate planning travel. I love to go places and see people but the whole thing about booking trains and sorting out dates does my head in.

I always travel by train when I can and have been regularly using the lovely rail networks we have for years - especially to visit my Dad in Northampton and my friend in Brighton. I used to always ring up to book a train but a couple of years ago I started to get really annoyed with the whole process. I'd ring and ask for the cheapest ticket and they'd quote me some ridiculous price. On one occasion I was told that they couldn't give me the cheapest price - I had to give them the times of my journey and then they would quote me a price from that. My priority is to get to where I want to be for the cheapest amount possible and therefore I am flexible in my time of travel but they refused to compromise. It got to a point where I would ring up to 10 times to speak to different people and suggest different travel times to get a range of prices to choose from. After a suggestion from a friend, I rang Virgin Trains booking line rather than the main trains number and found them to be incredibly helpful. They had no problem with suggesting a range of tickets at different prices and letting me choose my time of travel. It worked out a lot cheaper.

Now with the Internet it's much simpler. I've booked several tickets using thetrainline.com and had the luxury of flicking through page after page to again find the cheapest prices but I've noticed in the last few months prices can change rapidly.

A couple of months ago I decided I wanted to go and see a friend of mine in Brighton. Being a little hard up for cash I was excited to see that there seemed to be tickets available for £20. I came off the internet, rang my friend to check the date was okay with her, reconnected and BANG! Tickets are suddenly £64! I was very annoyed to say the least and consequently was unable to go away. r>
Today, after lots of penny saving and date confirmations with above friend I decided it was time to get my holiday sorted out. Firstly I went to thetrainline.com and looked up a ticket. For open return travel from Manchester to Brighton I was quoted £64.10 or £130 if I wanted business class travel - er...no thankyou. The journey would take 4 hours. I then went to gobycoach.com (I'm such a miser) and was quoted £28.50 but for an 8 hour journey. The thought of spending 8 hours on a coach made me shudder but to save money I thought I might do it and spend my extra thirty quid on something else.

Suddenly my nearly fried brain remembered Virgin Trains so I looked to see if they had a website. Sure enough they do. Okay - I've now got to the point...

When you hit the first page of the site you'll see a journey details form on the left hand side of the page. On the right hand side are various offers and promotions that Virgin are doing. Unless you're simply wanting to check train times I wouldn't bother filling in the form on this page because the results don't give you the fare prices.

At the top of the page you'll see a link for 'buy train tickets' - this is the one you want if you need to check prices. However - note that on the front page on the right hand there is a big advert for Virgin Value Fares. It's an animated ad that only says Virgin Value every now and then so just be aware of the - I'll come back to this later.

Registration with Virgin is simple. They just ask you for your name, email address and password. Later of course if you want to book tickets you will need to put in your home address and credit card number if you want to book online. They accept visa, switch and delta.

Once you've registered you are taken to a new page where you can put in your journey details. I noticed that there is a little sign at the bottom saying 'powered by thetrainline.com&#
39;. You can be very specific with the details you put in. You can request to leave or arrive after or before a certain time, ask for extra time to change trains, avoid certain stations and request the fastest or cheapest ticket.

A few moments wait and your suggested trains will appear (if there are any running at the times/dates you stated). Well I put in all my details and waited and there it was again £64.10 or £130. At first I thought oh well, I guess there aren't any Virgin Value tickets left. After all, it would make sense that when you are searching for a journey all the tickets available would be included...surely?

Apparently not. After witling for about 5 minutes over whether I was actually going to buy this sixty quid ticket I remembered the Virgin Value ad on the first page. I also remembered there had been another smaller advert on the logging in page. The scrooge in me got the better of me so I backed up a few pages until I found it. Clicking on the Virgin Value page will take you to a whole new search. The journey planner is the same but it searches only through Virgin Value tickets. Personally I think this is a bit dodgy. Yes they do advertise that cheaper tickets are available but then don't include them in the main part of the site. So if like me you had just clicked on 'buy tickets online' you would never know that there was a whole range of cheaper tickets to choose from as one would assume that all there tickets are included in the main journey planner.

Anyway - moan over. The Virgin Value tickets must be booked either 14 days, 7 days or 3 days in advance - with each getting progressively higher in price. The down side is that you can only book a single or return journey. I usually book open returns so I don't have to stress about when I'm coming home. With these you must specify the time of your return journey. The prices are given per journey there and back but they are MUCH lower. I finally bo
oked a ticket from Manchester to Brighton for £35! Half the price of the original!

Booking is easy. Stick in your credit card details and address and choose whether you want to have your tickets posted to you or whether to pick them up from the station when you go. I have to say I'm a wee bit wary of this process because last year I booked some train tickets on thetrainline.com and they debited the transaction twice. What happened was that instead of receiving a confirmation page I got a 'page not found'. I waited an hour and didn't receive a confirmation email which is procedure once you buy a ticket online so booked again. Even though I never received any confirmation of the first transaction at all the money was debited from my account. Very luckily I had enough in to cover this and they did sort it out really quickly but had I have gone overdrawn it could have got really messy. Today I noticed that on the Virgin site 'waiting' page which comes up whilst the transaction is going through, there is a notice saying that if the confirmation page doesn't appear after 3 minutes ring them - the number is given. Another tip is don't press the submit button more than once - if you are too trigger happy with the left click button you might find yourself out of pocket!

So to conclude - I much prefer buying tickets (and pretty much everything) online. I would definitely recommend the Virgin website because of the Virgin Value cheap tickets available. Just remember they are there!

Overall I prefer to travel of Virgin Trains anyway. I have always found their staff to be far more polite and trains cleaner than others.

Rail prices are extortionate which is crazy when the government are emphasising public transport to cut down on the use of planet-killer cars. The rail companies themselves are profit hungry and on any one train you'll find people travelling the same journey who have paid widely differing r
ates to travel on the same train!

I respect Richard Branson for giving us a better option and making travel more widely available to people but I am a little suspicious of the fact that the Virgin Value tickets aren't more obviously highlighted on the site. I think that they should inform the potential passenger that the Value ticket journeys are separate from the main site because I would imagine that a lot of people have assumed that the price they are quoted on the main journey planner is the cheapest they can get. Not so!

Dooyoo have given the link for the site above but here it is again
http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/