Advance ticket prices drop on Cross Country

[whole diary]

[Andrew1939 from West Oxon]

Many companies use this flexible system of setting prices that can go up and then down. They usually start with a lowish price and if the demand fills the quota at the low price the price goes up into the next price category , and so on until all tickets are sold. However as it gets closer to the date of the event or journey and lots of tcikest remain unsold, the price goes down to try and make late sales to bargain hunters. This appiies not just to railways but especially to airlines and also thatrical perfornces. lastminute.com exploits this system.

[Brucey]

This appiies not just to railways but especially to airlines and also thatrical perfornces. lastminute.com exploits this system.

Airlines are an excellent example.  Some flights I've been looking at daily have been ^65, ^75, ^85, ^95, ^105 and today back back down to ^85.  Funny considering it said "only 2 seats left at this fare" yesterday at ^105 ... those two people making a booking actually triggered a price reduction!

Back to the railway, I know NXEC^▸ (National Express East Coast) were lowering prices several years before handing back their franchise.  They initially denied it when I contacted them, claiming I must have looked at a different train

[eightf48544]

It seems to me that this is another case of the railways trying a pricing model from a very different mode, namely the airlines. It's fine for an airline to price in this way as they usually only have one or two flights a day to each destination. Not like FGW^▸ (First Great Western) with 2 trains an hour to Bristol and Virgin with 3 to Manchester. Also airlines don't usually stop as many times as FGW does between London and Bristol which gives rise to "hot seating" Eg London - Reading, Reading - Swindon, Swindon - Bristol. I recently got a seat reservation from Paddington to Slough admittedly on a journey starting in Worksop.

It's a classic case of  a realy messy many to many relationship which is a programmers worst nightmare! Too many trains with too  many seats and too many stops giving too many journey combinations. This makes it much harder to model than one plane one destination and a fixed number of seats.