Non-availability of XC Advance tickets

[whole diary]

[westernviceroy]

Does anyone know why there don’t appear to be any Advance tickets currently available for the Cross Country Network on Sunday 26 November? Have been told by their Customer Service team it is due to ‘engineering work’ but there hardly seem to be any such works that day apart from a few early/late services into and out of Bristol. Ironic as I have one of the current Cross Country 50% off offers celebrating their tenth anniversary and wish to use it that day, but it is only available for use with Advance tickets!

[ChrisB]

They certainly don't have any on Sunday afternoons, for sure - they removed these some while ago as demand is great enough such that they don't need to offer any as they can sell enough 'ordinary' tickets to fill their trains.

Engineering work can affect the offer too - Crosscountry have these affected

Sunday until 1040 and from 2300
The 0915 Bristol Temple Meads to Edinburgh and 1030
Bristol Temple Meads to Glasgow Central will depart
Bristol Temple Meads a few minutes earlier than
cheduled.

[westernviceroy]

Try as I may I can't find any XC^▸ (Cross Country Trains (franchise)) Advance tickets available for Sunday 26 Nov or Sunday 19 Nov come to that. Yet strangely there are plenty available for the Sundays before and after.  Even at the extremes of their network and times when I wouldn't have thought demand was that high (e.g. Edinburgh - Newcastle from 0800hrs to 1000hrs on those two Sundays) there are no XC advance tickets available yet all the VTEC trains do have them. Yet on any other Sunday XC tickets are plentiful at these times.

XC tell me that they've simple sold out their quotas for these two dates - but on every one of their trains yet not for other weekends? Can't help feeling this seems statistically unlikely.

Can understand how engineering work might impact availability as ChrisB suggests. This might be true for Sunday 19 Nov when there are XC diversions as Bristol Parkway is closed all day for the additional platform works, but this isn't the case for most of Sunday 26 Nov. And why should this knock on throughout the XC network?

Can the ticketing experts on the Forum shed any more light on this? Can't see why demand should be so much higher on these two particular dates. Is it something to do with how the XC demand management model is set up?

[ChrisB]

Has there been a huge take up on these 50% tickets already, maybe? What's the date range for purchase/use?