Don't Buy Your Tickets on thetrainline.com

kingbullit

When you buy a ticket from The Trainline you won't be able to make changes to your journey unless you pay a £10 admin fee. Now if you go for the supposedly cheaper return option of two singles, you'll be charged a whopping £20 to make any changes. However, if you book through virgintrains.co.uk you'll get the same booking system (powered by The Trainline) but if you wish to make a change to your ticket you'll only be charged a fiver each.

The added bonus being that if you have any problems you can speak to the very helpful and knowledgeable people at Virgin Customer Relations. If you've bought your ticket through the Trainline, Virgin can't help you. You can always try phoning The Trainline Customer Relations - only they don't have one! You could also email them through the 'Contact Us' section of the website, they promise a reply in 24 hours. They don't - not in 24 hours - not ever! The people on the end of the phone can't help you, but will give you an email address (salessupport@thetrainline.com). The only reply you'll get from this is "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)".

As you can probably guess I found out about the admin fee the hard way!

bunking_off

Interestingly, if you do make a change to a ticket bought through virgintrains.co.uk (ie by speaking to their internet advisors), the credit card entry comes through as being Trainline.

AlanCollier

Also (and this caught me out) if you buy online you won't be able to collect your ticket at a station from a machine for about another 3-4 hours, until they've been updated. This isn't clear and caused me a wasted journey across town. Unimpressed!

--Alan

gingerdad

I also found the lowest fair wasn't advertised on either the trainline or the virgin own site, 14 day advanced i think, it saved me 60 quid by phone virgin. Which was only beacuse i wanted to see the the 15 first class upgrade was available. so i now always phone once i have checked the web.

Regards

Mike

bunking_off

I'm probably putting 2+2 together and getting 5, but I suspect the website holds the fares as you go through the booking process, so if someone starts booking then doesn't complete, seemingly sold out fares can re-appear. Certainly, when a particular fare I want isn't available, I tend to go back to the beginning, and quite often it can mysteriously appear. I never go near the call centre unless I have to (eg to make an amendment) - it's a nightmare at the best of times.