Railcard Discount Pricing Scam?

PTurner_2

My disabled daughter has a Disabled Persons Railcard. She has recently been complaining to me that when she goes to book a ticket with her railcard, she is not given the full 33% discount. The rail operator appears to be able to achieve this by manipulating the underlying price of the standard adult ticket as soon as she enters her Railcard details. The following screenshots are for the exact same journey on the exact same date and time, and should make this clearer:

(a) Standard Single Ticket Price:


(b) Discounted Single Ticket Price:


The Railcard discounted ticket should actually come to £9.38 assuming the full 33% discount is applied, but you can see that they add £1.60 to the price of the Standard Adult ticket as soon as you try to make a booking with the Railcard. The same thing happens on thetrainline.com so we assume it's not to do with the website.

Does anyone have any ideas what's going on? Is this a scam, or is there a legitimate reason for them increasing the underlying price of the standard ticket for disabled people?

Many thanks!

KeithP

The two tickets you are looking at are Advance Singles.
Advance Single tickets are quota controlled.

When you got the quote without the railcard discount, it gave you the currently best available Advance Single - £14.00.
The system then 'reserves' that ticket for you to give you time to book it.

When you made the second request, with the railcard discount, the quota of £14.00 tickets had been sold - remember one is reserved pending your purchase - so the next higher ticket price band was offered - £15.40 - with a third discount = £10.25 (with a bit of rounding to nearest 5p).

After a short period of time the earlier reserved ticket will become available again if you don't buy it, but of course someone else may then buy it before you do.

As you can see, it's a bit of a lottery - but nothing to do with whether a railcard is used or not.

As an aside, I haven't done the sums but at a quick glance it looks like for the other ticket types - Off Peak or Anytime - the one third discount is given (again of course subject to rounding to the nearest 5p).

And it's not just for the Disabled Persons Railcard. The same mechanism will apply for all other railcards, e.g. Senior Railcard. 

PTurner_2

Many thanks for taking the time to give that answer Keith. Unfortunately that doesn't explain it though, as I checked the discounted ticket price first, and that was literally all I was doing - checking the price, not placing a booking, just browsing through the list of times and ticket prices.

To clarify: this has been happening frequently, and since it's not a one-off and occurs across all ticket types repeatedly and reproducibly, it's clearly not to do with a quota. Unless they have a separate quota for disabled tickets vs standard tickets? But I didn't think that's how the Railcard discount system was supposed to work?

KeithP

PTurner_2 said:

To clarify: this has been happening frequently, and since it's not a one-off and occurs across all ticket types repeatedly and reproducibly, it's clearly not to do with a quota.

Across all ticket types??

The examples you have given indicate that is not the case.

I have now done the simple arithmetic and clearly both the Anytime ticket and the Off Peak ticket are showing a railcard discount of over 34% in each case.
Even the First Class Advance ticket is showing a discount of 34% when a Railcard is specified.

PTurner_2

No not today. Today the discount seems to be applied correctly across the range of tickets on different routes that I checked.

I appreciate this probably seems a little nit-picky given that the pricing error only amounted to £1.05 on the Advance ticket type. But to my disabled daughter that's not an entirely trivial sum, and she claims this has happened to her several times now in recent months, which does start to add up, especially on more expensive tickets. And at the end of the day, a traveller should feel confident that a 33% Railcard discount should always and reliably be 33%, not 26.7% or whatever else the algorithm randomly decides on that particular day.

Anyway in the end, I decided to give the rail operator (SWR) a call to complain, and to be fair she did acknowledge there had been some "minor" pricing errors on some ticket types, but that it has now been fixed. Given I've noticed this issue on at least one prior occasion, and my daughter claims it has happened several times, I have my doubts the algorithm bug really has been resolved. My advice to anyone with a Railcard who may be concerned about this is to double-check prices manually and not just rely on the website(s)/apps, and to contact the rail operator if it doesn't resolve itself (assuming you can actually get through or get a response, of course...)