RMT union continues to be based. This time going after Trainline.
They surveyed over 2,600 rail workers, presumably their members, who told them about all sorts of problems they’ve had with trainline, via passengers.
Trainline does bad things! Deliberately confusing customers, selling bogus tickets, and having excessively expensive tickets.
Trainline sold £2bn worth of tickets in the first half of 2024, and had revenue from that of £106m.
I presume all the below is “at least once” in terms of frequency.
Survey results: - 90% of members surveyed said they’d experienced trainline selling passengers invalid tickets for their journeys, 80% reported passengers buying useless tickets and needing another purchase - 60% trainlines prices are consistently higher than booking directly, and Trainline fails to apply discounts such as GroupSave or regional offers leading to higher than ticket office prices! - Trainline often has incomplete or misleading information about which trains are running and times - 90% of members surveyed think Trainline fails to provide passengers with the best-value fair. The defaul settings prioritise showing you more expensive fares, rather than cheaper options.
RMT believes that a publically owned national rail system would eliminate the need for this third-party profiteering middle-person, whic his probably true! It would also keep ticket offices and onboard train staff employed and doing their good work. Yay!
My opinions
I would like it if their research weren’t just an opinion survey, and they actualyl looked into trainlines practices. I wounder how one/I would do this? I guess a good start would be to compare Trainline’s prices for a journey with the price shown on the regional operator’s websites.
I want to know what the deal is for operators, because their web booking systems are often the same backend as trainline, just, presumably, that operator only? I wonder how that works. It would be interesting looking for tickets that can’t be valid on trainline.
If I wanted to do this, I’d have to find that horrible, giant, pdf of all the ticketing regulations and read it thoroughly. That sounds decidedly unpleasant.
Oh hey! There's a policy briefing at the bottom of the page that is much better written and more thorough than the press release I just read. Yay.