National Express East Coast

Ive been a regular user of the east coast mainline for over 2 years. Used to be able to go on line on thurs am and get a range of options for newly released advanced tickets. Now I find it much more difficult. They seem to be drip feeding the tickets onto the web or restricting the numbers of good deals available.

Its so frustrating to book a ticket which is not ideal to find a few hours later the ideal ticket becomes available.

I'm not a happy customer. Having spent around £10k over the last 2 years I'm now looking for alternatives.

Does anyone know whats going on or is it just another case of making tarriffs complex in order to get more money out of customers.

I'm glad they have lost the franchise.....good riddance!!

Paul

We used the National Express train service to get down to London a few weeks ago. It was the start of our Honeymoon so for the first time ever, we paid the extra money to go in first class. Our first class tickets were £38 each (single), compared to around £25 for standard class. So what does the extra money get you? Well, the seats themselves are bigger and seemingly more comfortable than standard class. Each seat in first class has access to a table and there seemed to be plenty of power points scattered around to enable people to charge laptops and mobile phones. Each table had a supply of bottled water and shortbread biscuits and there was a guy ...  Read the complete review

I use NXEC every week - no choice, I work in London, but live in the North East (my choice). Unlike MPs I can't claim the cost of travel back, so I have to grab the tickets as soon as they're released - and if you were quick (very, very quick), you could grab cheap tickets.... until about 4 weeks ago. National Express have *almost tripled* the cost of tickets since May - it's not a mistake, believe you me, we watch these prices closely in order to keep costs down. We first thought it was profiteering for the school Summer holidays, but nope, NXEC have kept their prices up in September as well. They're also squeezing passengers in other ways - book your ticket ...  Read the complete review

Many people may not be aware that nationalexpresseastcoast.com sell train tickets for any journey in the UK, not just for National Express East Coast services. The advantage of nationalexpresseastcost.com is that there is no booking fee, or credit card fee. Both charges are levied by many other online train ticket sites. At first, I found the ticket purchase area of the site a little difficult to use. In fact, I used to search for prices on trainline.com, and then make the booking on nationalexpresseast.com. I have got used to it now though. The top half of the booking page displays a number of ticket price options. By selecting an option, you ...  Read the complete review

From my experience there are two distinct sides to the National Express trains that operate on the East Coast (the same line that GNER used to run on). To briefly sum up these sides mostly everything is very positive except for the cost of tickets. Starting with the positives, the trains are always pretty clean and I never find that seating is too cramped. Preferably I sit at tables of four where you get a lot of room but even the airline seats are ok, and the table you get is reasonably sized. In my experience the guards are very friendly and courteous which makes longer journeys in particular all the better. To add to this, the trolley service ...  Read the complete review