Stop this attempt to abolish flexible & affordable rail tickets in the UK.

Bricks

MilesT6060842 said:

On a related point, historically some airlines offered "bereavement discount" schemes--you bought the ticket you needed at the available price last minute, and then put in a claim after the event with proof of entitlement for the discount (e.g. death certificate for near relative); and got a refund or a gift card for future travel.  If there will be high last minute train prices then we need to press for similar schemes.

This of course wouldn't at all deal with the scenario where you might have to be making repeat visits to someone over an extended time period.

Bricks

Here's quite a good blog post about the current situation, and the importance of keeping walk-up fares:

https://blog.brfares.com/2026/09/03/walkup-fares-a-deceptively-simple-product/

Walk-up fares offer a package of benefits. Each one is small, making
it easy to dismiss in isolation, but taken together they form a
compelling argument:

simple and quick to purchase, no need to select a train

no need to purchase until you’re sure you’ll make the journey

a knowable price: the reassurance of knowing in advance exactly how much your journey will cost

free insurance against missing your intended train – just take a later one

flexibility to change your plans on-the-go: stay longer at your destination, stop off on the way back etc.

Another way of thinking of this is simply as insurance against
multiple different types of uncertainty. Most people will make use of
any of these individual “insurance policies” relatively rarely, and that
makes it easy for the industry to dismiss these benefits. But taken
together they are more than the sum of their parts: walk-up fares let
the railway carry your uncertainty, so you don’t have to.

There is a symmetry here: when the passenger has flexibility, from
the train operator’s point of view there is less certainty in the demand
for individual trains. But that can be turned around: the railway can
transfer this demand-uncertainty risk to the passenger. The
well-established way of doing this is to use demand-responsive pricing
or put more bluntly, “to price off demand”.

LightFlare

The thing people seem to miss with affordable fares,rates etc etc is that somewhere and somehow the companies have to make up the profit difference/loss

Scrapping cheap rates MIGHT reduce standard fares, but would result in an increase in the previously cheap ones

Same with holidays and school breaks - If they drop the prices when demand is high, they would have to increase the prices when it isnt (and probably face empty facilities)