Any guesses for what chaos awaits us on this train?
Edit to add: This is not the ticket, it was printed alongside the actual ticket, after asking for seating preferences.
Any guesses for what chaos awaits us on this train?
Edit to add: This is not the ticket, it was printed alongside the actual ticket, after asking for seating preferences.
“Specific.” It’s general admission. Ideally, they would only sell as many seat reservations as there are seats available in whatever cars are in the “seat pool.”
I don’t see a problem here.
I suppose it’s irritating that you pay (a likely large amount of money as it’s probably a UK ticket) for a ticket with a seat reservation, the least they could do is actually assign you a seat.
If it’s a free for all and - as you likely correctly say - they don’t oversell the number of tickets against the number of seats, then the reservation card of the ticket is a little pointless really.
It’s likely to differentiate between the general admission cars and the cars that do have assigned (and probably more comfortable) seats.
No, only individual seats are reserved. There’s no “reservations only” carriage, but there are carriages that are more or less reserved. Off the top of my head, I think coach B is often very close to, but never actually fully reserved, whereas D has only a minority of awards reserved.
They absolutely oversell on a regular basis on UK train.
Do you have a reference for this?
I’m not questioning that it happens - it’s a common thing in high volume hotels or high value airline routes after all - but I’d be interested in what sort of margins they oversell at.
That said, most of the documents would likely be commercially sensitive I should imagine.
I’ve travelled on hundreds and hundreds of trains in the UK. On busy services, unless you’re getting on at the start, if you don’t have a specific seat reserved, you will be standing. This is normal. I don’t have a source for that claim, I just have many years of experience.
There’s a plausibility gap on capping ticket sales for trains. Why on earth would they stop selling “anytime” tickets? They’re really expensive and a train with plenty of people standing costs the company no more but earns them a great deal.
What’s unusual here is that this looks like it came with an “advance” ticket, which is cheaper, limited in number, only available in advance, and is required to come with a reserved seat, but they’ve clearly oversold even them.
You’ve reserved A seat.
Except you haven’t, that’s the point.
If you don’t get to the train early, you have to stand. That’s how British trains work. People who get to the train will see many seats unreserved saying “Seat Available” on the overhead sign, regardless of whether they’ve reserved a seat.
So someone who hasn’t clicked “reserve a seat” on the booking process might sit on that, while you stand in the hallway.
The ticket literally means “sorry, you don’t have a seat assigned”.
But you are permitted to sit. Just the seat you find is not defined.
Everyone is permitted to sit, except if the seat is reserved for someone else who has a normal seat reservation ticket which specifies the coach and seat number.
Exactly
Yes, but which one?
Who cares? Some airlines do this too. You just get a boarding group, and pick your own seat
Do they still give you a boarding pass, and a seperate piece of paper stating that you have a reservation, but does not in itself act as a reciept nor boarding pass?
Also, that example is bad to begin with, because airlines will oversell their planes ALL THE TIME. Spirit and Fronteer literally try to oversell every single plane on purpose. The idea being that they can try to convince you to get reimbursed with Fronteer bucks. A fictional currency that is only good within their company and has no outside real world value. Then they hope that you take it, and then later that currency expires. Meaning in the end you paid for an airline ticket that you never used and have no recoarse to get refunded.
And a lot of people hate that process and prefer to be able to book a specific seat.