ATOC is dismissing a report from the Consumers’ Association which claims that many rail passengers are paying unnecessarily high fares because retailing staff are not properly trained, and also because the National Rail Enquiries website does not always offer the cheapest options for a journey.
In its magazine Which?, the CA reported the results of undercover research, claiming that 59 per cent of booking office clerks and 43 per cent of NRE operators did not offer the lowest fares.
The report concluded: ‘The worst result was when we asked about making two round trips from Oxford to Cardiff in a week. For nine of the 10 times we asked the question, we were advised to buy two return tickets costing £200 each. Just one clerk correctly advised that buying a weekly season ticket would save £112.’
The design of the NRE website also came under fire in Which?, which said: ‘Ticking “include slower trains” on Nationalrail.co.uk answered four of our 15 questions. Otherwise you would have needed special knowledge, such as knowing exactly which station to insert in the “travel via” box.’
Which? surveyed just over 1,500 people, half of whom were ‘confident’ that they knew how to get the best fare.
The chief executive of Which?, Peter Vicary-Smith, said: “Train operators seem blind to the fact that their ticketing systems are too complicated.
“If people who do this for a living can't find the cheapest fare, what hope do passengers have?”
The Association of Train Operating Companies has labelled the report from Which? as ‘seriously misleading’.
A spokesman for ATOC said: “Asking 150 questions on unrealistic and obscure scenarios cannot come close to giving a representative view of the 1.3 billion journeys that are made every year by train. The researchers haven’t actually asked for the cheapest ticket in all the scenarios and even where they have done, they have explicitly excluded the cheapest fares.
“The claim that only 54% of passengers are satisfied with train services needs to be treated with a great deal of caution. Even though the magazine only surveyed 1,500 people, it claims its research is ‘more accurate’ than that of the independent watchdog Passenger Focus, which twice a year samples more than 27,000 passengers and whose latest survey found that 84 per cent were satisfied with train services.”
But the Campaign for Better Transport said the Which? report was in line with its own call for ‘cheaper, simpler, fairer’ rail fares.
Alexandra Woodsworth, who is the Campaign’s public transport campaigner, said: “Train passengers shouldn’t have to work so hard to find a decent value fare. There is little point in having cheap fares on offer if the system is so complicated that even ticket office staff can’t help you find them, and it certainly doesn’t make up for the extremely high prices at the other end of the scale.
“The Government is planning to give train companies a much greater degree of control over fares and ticketing, but the lack of passenger confidence highlighted in this research should act as a warning. Ticket pricing must be fairer and clearer to encourage more people to take the train – which would be good for passengers, train companies and the environment.”