GWR are offering 50% off selected Advance Purchase Fares from 2nd-9th January 2025 for travel between Friday 10th January and Sunday 13th April 2025 inclusive.

There will be 100,000 Standard Class and 50,000 First Class seats available. Reduced fares to/from Chelteham will not be available during the Festival race meeting, nor to Cardiif  during Six Nations matches there.

 

At the risk of being accused of paraphrasing another erstwhile Forum member......how will the resulting revenue shortfall be covered? By the taxpayer I assume?

 
Will there be a revenue shortfall?

A relatively quiet time of year for discretionary train travel, such an offer may actually improve fare income.

 

Come now, TG.  Since Covid you’ve often said in this new era of home/hybrid working that the railways need to encourage more leisure travel.  Yet you criticise when they try to do exactly that via the most persuasive method of doing so…reducing the price of the product. 

 

I was asking a question. Portraying it as largesse from GWR is at best disingenuous.

However to your other point, for me, in this context the best way to make the offering more persuasive and keep the railway generally viable is to make it reliable 7 days a week. A half price ticket on a weekend train which is cancelled because there's no-one available to drive it isn't much of an incentive.

Currently, the railway is doing an excellent job of persuading current and potential customers to use their cars instead.....and that's driven mostly by poor reliability, not cost.

This is just digging the money pit a little deeper.

 
Who's saying that these tickets are for Sundays?

Mondays & Fridays need usage.....

 

But WILL there be an additional shortfall?   I recall many years ago at an RDG consultation in Bristol when they were looking at how to modernise the fare system that one of their requirements was to maintain the same level of income, and I suggested that lowering the average fare by x% might increase passenger numbers by 2x%.   Cut £100 to £70 for a fare - 30% fare cut, 60% increase in passenger numbers, income up by 12%.    Interesting that there was no denial what so ever of my speculative figures - just a rather brusque put down that it must be done on the same number of passengers as was current.  Apparently that rule was so basic that they hadn't bothered to state it in the question!

Provided that the special purchase fares do not abstract too must from existing users but rather result in a goodly proportion of new journeys (and the evidence of them not being available during gold cup suggests it's being engineered for that) then there probably won't be a need for extra taxpayer support.

 

Mondays and Fridays need trains too - or is it just at Melksham that the unreliability and gaps of 4 and 6 hours between trains has spread like an infection away from Sundays?

 

I made no mention of GWR in the post you quoted.  If it’s disingenuous at best, what is it at worst?

 
Does anyone actually see any of these savings?
I'm travelling from Weston to Paddington (11th / 12th) nothing to be saved there sadly

 

It's December 31 today....

 

And...?

 
And ... they're not on sale until 2nd January. 

I think ChrisB was gently pointing out that Phantom is rather optimistic in looking for them today - see above post.

 
Sale underway ...



Noting no senior railcard discounts - good price anyway, but with a railcard not always the lowest. I am tempted to make a couple of extra trips which, I suppose, proves their point.

 
Checked for my journeys to/from Paddington from BPW for my February trip to Switzerland. £21.00 sale fares available on my chosen trains but the return trip the cheapest was an advance with railcard at £15.95. 

 
Try booking to a destination without reservations available - i.e. Okehampton.

GWRs booking engine throwing an error - instead of booking any seat on stated train, its saying no seat reservable, so I can't sell you a Sale Advance ticket!!

 

 
Cheapest tickets between Bristol and London £21 single.  No big deal about that, as that's the cheapest they are even when the sale isn't on anyway!  I found this to be the case when GWR had a sale last year!

 
Having had a good nose around, there are many destinations away from London/Reading whose current 'normal' advance fares are less than the promotional fares -= especially the longer distance ones into the Southwest & west Wales. Take care!

 

Indeed, or fares that are the same price they are normally!

It appears to be not easy to find these advance sale fares! 

Anyone got any examples they can post of true advance sale fares you've found?

 

Yes - my day trip on 28th January, Melksham to Penzance, 2 x £12 singles, which are below "normal" advance fares on those timings, even taking into account the senior railcard discount that's not offered on sale tickets.

Now - BRFares suggest the following:



Which suggests to me that GWR sometimes do offer the £12 outside the sale, and indeed the railcard discount would them apply - so you might consider that this is not really a sale - that they may have taken the £12 at the time of year they would normally offer them anyway, labelled them as being a "sale" and then put the price up for old bogies like me by not giving us a loyalty discount, even though we have paid for that loyalty discount card.

 

I had missed that key point.

 
Naivity perhaps, but trying to look for LOS - SWI on 14/3 returning on 16/3.  Have found an exceptional £ 11.00 out single, but the returns options are showing no advances of any time.

User error on my part, or should I leave it a few days to book?

Cheers all.

 
You appear to have some engineering work down your way on the Sunday which will curtail the cheap fares