Cheapest Train Tickets

yorkie2

Some websites do that, but they will be displaying the 'product' price e.g. a Manchester to Birmingham ticket, which won't necessarily be the cheapest product to make that journey.

Account

yorkie2 said:

Some websites do that, but they will be displaying the 'product' price e.g. a Manchester to Birmingham ticket, which won't necessarily be the cheapest product to make that journey.

What do these websites do?
Are there any websites where you can search by price? So the cheapest tickets are displayed at the top of the list?

Similar to how you could search products from Argos and display the cheapest items at the top of the list?

If not, could anybody design such a site that shows the cheapest available tickets? 

Account

A bit like what Argos does... Search by relevance, which could be date and time, or search by price, low to high 😉

redux

Fares change from day to day, or even within the day.

A trip I could do around here (and have done) could involve an advance fare for the middle part of it, with ordinary singles or some cycling at each end. This advance fare can change 3 or 4 times in the previous 3 or 4 days, including twice during the previous evening, and can often but not always reach its cheapest on the actual day of travel. It can even be bought only a few minutes before the train.

A while ago I looked at a mixture of split fares for a certain trip to somewhere in the Midlands, from the south. I noticed that doing a new search a bit later produced different results. Some split components were getting cheaper while others got more expensive, with some significant price switches around 1 am. I concluded that a real connoisseur of all this stuff, but not me, might work out the splits and deliberately buy the various parts at different times of day.

So in answer to your question, I doubt there is any website that can give you a full summary of the cheapest possible options and detailed instructions exactly when to buy the tickets. Most will only do a calculation on the spot at the moment you ask, and some of those split websites don't find the cheapest options anyway, such as Bournemouth to Stansted for £11 I found myself a year or two ago for a friend, involving one advance bought weeks ahead and another advance on the day, or Truro to Basingstoke, which I split myself at Exeter (seems a pretty obvious guess) to easily beat the split website.

Account

Back in the day, 2000 to 2001, I went into the train station every couple of months and asked 'what is your cheapest fare to Bournemouth' and a few times it came back at £5 each way and they would tell me what date that was for so I would buy the advance ticket.

These days, the websites with the advance ticket prices have every ticket that is available to them, and it would not take a complicated program or software to list these in order of price.

I would happily pay a small booking fee for this convenience. 

As I asked before, to visit friends and family in other parts of the country it doesn't have to be on a precise date. 

Any date is fine, I just want to find the cheapest ticket without manually clicking though every day for the next few months 🥴😳🤔🤪😳🥴😂😂

yorkie2

What journey are you looking to make next?

redux

What's wrong with the websites that already exist?

Account

yorkie2 said:

What journey are you looking to make next?

London to Birmingham on the cheapest available train in September 
I can manually click through about 100 pages and jot down the cheapest fares as I go through. 
Or copy and paste each page into a spreadsheet, arrange the columns accordingly and then format the Price column from lowest to highest. 

Account

redux said:

What's wrong with the websites that already exist?

There is nothing wrong with them, so to speak, but they could be enhanced. 

Just how a shop website can list the items from the lowest price to the highest price, a train ticket website could also sort all available tickets from lowest price to highest price. 

This will mean that if any date is good for travelling on, the person will not need to click through every single page to find the cheapest ticket. 

That is what I am looking for. If there isn't such a site I might try and design one, and charge a small booking fee for the user

yorkie2

Account said:

yorkie2 said:

What journey are you looking to make next?

London to Birmingham on the cheapest available train in September 
I can manually click through about 100 pages and jot down the cheapest fares as I go through. 
Or copy and paste each page into a spreadsheet, arrange the columns accordingly and then format the Price column from lowest to highest. 

1110 London Marylebone to Birmingham Moor Street on Wednesday 2 September. Price is £6.40