East Coast website charges postage fee - workaround details!

yorkie2

Many people use East Coast to book rail tickets. They were the first company to use the WebTIS system by Atos Origin, which is widely considered easier to use than Thetrainline.

However East Coast now want to charge you to have tickets posted to you. There is no need to use East Coast's website any more, as other operators such as London Midland use the same, easy-to-use booking engine!

However if you wish to stick with East Coast and/or take advantage of their 10% discounts on their cheapest Advance fares, there is a way round it.

If you place a ticket from a station that does NOT have ticket collection facilities in your basket (e.g. for me, living in York, I can choose Poppleton at no extra cost) then you will NOT be charged for postage, even if you add loads of other tickets that originate at stations that do have ticket collection facilities!

This change is very recent, possibly even implemented today. It was discovered on Railforums' fares & ticketing site. (Click here for the discussion if you are interested)

I hope many people here find this useful!

(One only thing to be careful of here, is that if you are booking an Advance ticket, if the station you usually use has barriers, you may not be allowed into that station on a ticket from a previous station, this is because Advance tickets do not allow the journey to be "broken" which includes starting or finishing "short").

Jeff_Bridges_hair

Cheers yorkie. Will make sure i always use the tvm option from now on

yorkie2

Update:

If there isn't an alternative station near you that you can book from, then put a Lostock Hall (LOH) - Bamber Bridge (BMB), Child Single in your basket for 30p. (Ensure that the date for this ticket is before you are travelling) and it will not charge the £1 postage. You can then discard the 30p single ticket! (Thanks to 'Bignosemac' on Railforums for the suggestion )

Absolutely bonkers, but this is UK railways we are talking about here!