Midland Mainline free weekend travel w/ annual ticket

reggie_V

I've recently got a Midland Mainline annual season ticket to be paid by monthly direct debit. One feature of their "routed" annual tickets (not sure what an unrouted one is) is that you can have "free" weekend travel anywhere on the Midland Mainline e.g. if you've got a ticket between Leicester and Nottingham you could travel "for free" to London at the Weekend.

This doesn't apply to tickets between Bedford and London or Luton and London; not sure why. Also it's subject to confirmation when you ring up to arrange the annual ticket.

Has anyone made use of this? Haven't tried as yet and one member of station staff I spoke to about it hadn't even heard of it.

Relevant page on Midland Mainline site:
http://www.midlandmainline.com/mainpage.aspx?id=125

Reggie.

laird

A routed ticket is one which specifies the carrier in this case Midland Mainline, normally a season ticket would be "Any Permitted" allowing the customer free choice over carrier.
Having a specific carrier or route specified means that more money goes to one company rather than being split between all operators on the route.
From a customer point of view this might mean being able to use only one intercity service per hour rather than a more frequent local service, in this case to make up for the inconvenience midland mainline is offering compensation in the form of free weekend travel.

Since Midland Mainline ceases to operate on the 10th November it could be tempting to purchase a season ticket under the current regime then take either a pro-rata refund or exchange if the new operator has a more generous offer.

Stations to Bedford from St Pancras would already be benefiting from a similar discount scheme described as an "annual gold card" which is explained elsewhere on this site.