Train station ticket machines are charging up to 154% more than booking online, with the best-value fares unavailable or hard to find.
We sent mystery shoppers to 15 train stations across England to find the cheapest single fare for a journey that day, the following morning and in three weeks. Tickets bought online were cheaper around three quarters of the time.
Same-day tickets were 52% more expensive on average when bought from a machine. A one-way fare from Northampton to Cardiff was £107 from a machine, but just £43 from online retailer Trainline - less than half the price.
Though rail companies recently scrapped plans to close almost all of England’s ticket offices following a huge public backlash, many rail travellers are still reliant on ticket machines or online booking. Only one in six of the stations within the Department for Transport’s control have a full-time ticket office, and 759 stations don’t have a ticket office at all.
In 2022, around 150m rail journeys were bought from ticket machines.
Ticket machines vs online fares
We checked the price of 75 journeys at 15 ticket machines - each one owned by a different train operator - against the cheapest price available from the UK’s biggest ticket site, Trainline.
When we asked mystery shoppers to find the cheapest fare for travel that day, 11 out of 15 journeys were cheaper on Trainline than at ticket machines.
Same-day tickets - biggest price differences
No advance tickets
Two thirds of the ticket machines didn’t sell advance tickets - cheaper, non-flexible tickets available up to the day of travel on many routes, and sometimes up to 10 minutes before departure. For example, the cheapest fare from a machine from Canley in Coventry to Cardiff was an off-peak single for £74, but we found a £27 advance fare online.
Many machines also didn’t appear to sell off-peak fares at peak times. When a mystery shopper visited Hitchin, Herts, first thing in the morning and looked for the cheapest one-way ticket to York later that day, the only option was an anytime single costing £133 - £78 more than the cheapest fare on Trainline (£55).
Great Northern, which runs that station and its ticket machines, told us you can buy an off-peak ticket at any time by clicking on the ‘Tickets for future travel’ button, which you usually use to buy tickets for a later date. Two of our mystery shoppers were caught out by this and ended up with a much more expensive fare than they needed.
Great Northern told us: ‘Our ticket machines are optimised to give people fast service for the simple journeys that most people are making. If that off-peak fare were to be placed on the home screen, customers might easily select an invalid ticket if they were in a rush.’
Unclear information
Where machines do sell off-peak fares, travellers might still select the wrong ticket as there was often no information on when the ticket was valid. At the end of the booking process, in tiny print, it said: ‘Restrictions apply - please inquire.’ If there’s no ticket office, or you’re in a hurry and miss the small print, you risk a £50 penalty fare plus the price of the correct ticket.
Most ticket machines we tried had no timetable information, including at the UK’s busiest station, Waterloo. You couldn’t make seat reservations and could only buy fares up to a month ahead, even though tickets usually go on sale up to three months in advance.
Smart ticket machines
Only five stations visited had smart kiosks - machines with real-time information that sell advance fares up to three months ahead, and which make seat reservations and display journey-planning information.
But even smart machines didn’t always match the online price because they don’t sell split tickets - when you buy two or more tickets for a journey instead of a single through-ticket, which can work out cheaper. A one-way fare from Holmes Chapel in Cheshire to London was £40 pricier at a smart kiosk (£66) than Trainline’s cheapest split ticket (£26).
Splitting your journey is legal, but GWR told us: ‘Current regulations do not allow train operators to recommend split tickets from ticket machines or ticket offices’.
Several train operators promised to improve their ticket machines as part of their ticket office closure proposals, using funds from the Treasury. When we asked the Department for Transport if it would still pay for machine upgrades, it didn’t respond. But it told us it will ‘seek to support the industry to modernise ticket machines’.
Our research
England’s stations are run by train operators, who are responsible for their ticket machines and ticket offices. In October 2023, we sent mystery shoppers to 15 train stations run by 15 different operators: Oxford, Kings Cross, Euston, Holmes Chapel, Tottenham Hale, Market Harborough, Hitchin, Canley, Northampton, Grays, Marylebone, Vauxhall, Peckham Rye, Nunhead, Deptford.
source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/train-station-machines-can-charge-twice-the-price-of-online-tickets-asfbN6V5xda8