5:37 PM Cheap train tickets: cut travel costs - MoneySavingExpert | ||||
The train ticketing system is a farce. To keep your spending away from the buffers, you need to learn how to play the system with hidden tricks. This guide has more than 20 sneaky ways to save on fares, including how to split tickets (you can use our free tool), beat booking fees, find hidden promotions and much more. 20+ ways to slash fares, including.
Most people know if you book early, you can get cheaper train tickets, yet often these disappear quicker than empty seats on a commuter journey. So to ensure a bargain, the key moment to start looking is about 12 weeks before. This is because contractually Network Rail must have the timetable set 12 weeks in advance. So train operators commonly, though not always, release cheap advance tickets shortly after. It's sometimes not dead on 12 weeks though, often more like 10 or 11. To help, National Rail has a future travel chart. showing the furthest away date in the future you can buy advance tickets for each train firm. If you know when and where you want to go, there's a sneaky way to be first in the cheap tickets queue. TheTrainline's* ticket alert system emails the moment cheap advance tickets for a specific journey come on sale (commonly the cheapest fares). This is the big trick everyone should know. Instead of buying tickets for the whole journey, bizarrely, buying tickets for its constituent parts separately can slash the price – even though you're travelling on exactly the same train. It's perfectly allowed within the National Rail Conditions of Carriage. The only rule is that the train must call at the stations you buy tickets for. Save Ј219 on a London-Durham return To show how this works, we unearthed this cracking example. For a London to Durham return, the cheapest ticket was an anytime return at Ј301. Yet the train stopped at York, so instead we found four singles: The total cost for those tickets was just Ј82. a saving of Ј219. Just to clear it up… It's the same train at the same time - the only difference is you've four tickets covering the journey rather than one Full step-by-step guide to finding split tickets Find the journey's cheapest standard price Get the standard journey price. Without it, you won't know if you can save. Find out where the train stops
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