The drop in attendances at this year’s Cheltenham Festival should serve as a warning against treating rail users as cash cows
I had one of those earth-shattering, eyebrow raising afternoons last Tuesday when psychological price thresholds being broken were at the forefront of my mind. Three in the space of a few hours. The first was being charged over £7 for a medium Big Mac meal in McDonald’s. I’d always thought that hell would freeze over when the £5 barrier – avoided for so many years by Ronald and his gang – was breached, but then we moved from there to over £7 so frenetically quickly. Then, I was charged £4.45 for a bottle of coke in a boozer (‘it’s the sugar tax, mate’ lamented the landlord). The final denouement to my afternoon of game-changing sadness was the £22.80 off peak single fare from Ely to Norwich! Even if the fares went up earlier this month, there’s definitely no sugar-coating the fact that something’s not quite right about this price for a 51-minute trip.
I don’t know much about Ely in truth, in fact I’ve never really been there before. I was travelling down from York to Norwich and found myself needing to change there and buy a ticket as I didn’t have one for the last leg of my journey. It wasn’t just the price that shocked me, it was the disparity in the two legs of my trip. York to Peterborough in a matter of no time whatsoever – I had a quick snooze and we were pulling into the station, but then I kind of assumed it would be a doddle to go east to Norwich. I’d always had this perception the two locations were sort of co-joined – I mean it’s not called ‘Norwich and Peterborough’ building society for nothing and back in the day of genuine cross country networks, there always seemed to be a decent, fairly frequent and connecting service linking Anglia with access to the North and Scotland. Now, I had to change at Ely and wait over an hour for my ‘connection’. The bar on the featureless station was cold and miniscule so instead I hung round the Tesco across the road – it was certainly not an experience I’d like to repeat.
There will be countless ‘Elys’ across the UK whereby bus and coach companies could rise to the challenge of providing a cost-effective alternative
There will be countless ‘Elys’ across the UK whereby bus and coach companies could rise to the challenge of providing a cost-effective alternative. At what point does the rail industry accept defeat on certain flows and realise that actually taking a ‘transport solution’ perspective is better than just trying to kid itself that rail is the answer? Harrogate to Leeds, where Transdev Blazefield trumps Northern any day or time of the week, for starters.
The response to complaints about high fares is that the industry is too expensive to operate without customers feeling the pain in terms of prices. Short of a few logical cost reductions, maybe the answer is to look at those flows where the train fare is too high or it’s too pricey and complicated to design a network proposition that hangs together so that there will always be connections and instead subsidise and market a bus and coach alternative? That doesn’t mean ripping up railway track as it will still be needed but not just as a Peterborough or Ely to Norwich solution? Of course, we already have the Excel bus service run by First between Peterborough and Norwich – perhaps make it a GBR branded route in the future and invest in faster journey times, more limited stopping, increased frequency, high profile marketing and further improve bus priority measures on the approach to both major locations.
My price point-breaking Tuesday was followed in the following days by interesting debate on social media around the drop in attendances at this year’s Cheltenham Festival. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather spend an evening at horrific rail awards events than attend Cheltenham but I found the discussion intriguing. It seems as if the market has turned around and stuck two fingers up at profiteers who thought that there was no limit to what they could charge for a pint at the racing, or accommodation in and around the town, alongside entry and generally a lack of customer service all-round, combined with suited and booted, coke-snorting chavs ruining the ambience for everyone. Even the £9 shuttle bus fare to the venue has been roundly criticised. It’s a bit like the test match at the Oval last year when eye-wateringly high admission prices were the catalyst for swathes of empty seats. There is no such thing as a guaranteed captive audience – even for great sporting traditions.
Transport needs to wake up to the Cheltenham effect. It’s a salutary reminder that the couch or bar is increasingly a threat
Transport needs to wake up to the Cheltenham effect. It’s a salutary reminder that the couch or bar is increasingly a threat. Post Covid, home and online entertainment has been viewed all-round as a palatable alternative to actually being there. Shortcomings in customer service that might have been tolerated before, are seen as a bigger issue now and the reason not to make the trip. Whilst watching in the local bar might still involve a short bus journey to get there, few, if any will need to catch a train to do so.
Back in the day, it was cheaper and easier to get to the game, in any case. Even when my beloved Crystal Palace were languishing in the doldrums fighting relegation from the old second division, there’d always be a special train to the match, or at the very least a few subsidised carriages on a scheduled service.
I remember in 1985, we chartered a special to our away game at Sheffield United with half the train segregated for Palace fans and the rest for Millwall oiks, with the train continuing to Barnsley for their match. Costs were split, but arrangements such as these were a familiar sight with the rail network full to the brim with loco-hauled special trains on Saturdays the length and breadth of the UK.
It comes back to not only this brazen complacency about there always being demand, but also a lack of understanding about markets. How much analysis was carried out not just regarding pricing at the racecourse, but in totality around the cost of an overall trip to Cheltenham and the experience, when the proposition and other costs for customers were evaluated? Hotels, train and bus companies, restaurants and anyone else that profits from the festival have had their comeuppance. So too, not enough detailed analysis goes into the individual fares thrust upon rail customers. Whilst Ely is a relatively prosperous place, I bet that this wasn’t even a matter of consideration when that Super Off Peak Single was set. What’s the logic, for instance, that there doesn’t appear to be a Super Off Peak Return on Greater Anglia enabling cost-effective overnight stays, in a way that occurs on the network. I had to shell out £25 x 2 for a recent evening trip from London to Colchester returning the next day.
Rail could learn a lot from the bus industry here. Most bus companies know on a micro level the intricacies of their market and have a strong grip on their propensity to pay and their likely responsiveness to different ticketing products
Rail could learn a lot from the bus industry here. Most bus companies know on a micro level the intricacies of their market and have a strong grip on their propensity to pay and their likely responsiveness to different ticketing products. They understand market forces and demographics far better than many of the highly remunerated commercial directors in train operating companies – many of whom have been sadly reduced to positions of utter powerlessness in this more centralised structure where the revenue risk isn’t taken by the operators. If they aren’t involved in bespoke train company specific marketing campaigns (and let’s face it many aren’t doing these anymore), then what exactly do they do all day? I don’t get the impression that they are instigating over granular analysis of market trends across their patches or commissioning research throughout their communities.
Even just understanding existing customer sentiment got too difficult around the time Covid kicked in, when the National Rail Passenger Satisfaction Survey was kyboshed and many in the industry got overly excited by the complicated and flawed Wavelength survey which was supposed to provide us with the ultimate market research mechanism. Now, we don’t really have anything credible.
The problem is indeed this lack of closeness to the market, combined with a Cheltenham-style arrogance that fares can be ratcheted up interminably. I’m tired of hearing platitudes around ‘fares simplification’ and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) as the answer. I really don’t trust PAYG. Last week, I went through my bank statements to see how much I had paid on some tube fares and on the same flow, Hatton Cross to London, I could see no consistency whatsoever. Contactless has just been introduced at my local station, Shepperton and I’m still not convinced whether it’s SWR or Transport for London debiting my account, nor whether I need to tap out when I return home, as per on the Tube (there’s no signage explaining what we need to do). Typically, there’s nothing telling customers that contactless doesn’t enable Railcard discounts. Of course, there’s not, it wouldn’t surprise me if the industry is at some point forced to do away with railcards.
In an industry which increasingly ‘manages by committee’, and lacks overall accountability, I’m not even sure I’d know who is ultimately responsible for deciding on fares strategy
All this would be more bearable (sort of) if we could ever feel that there was an end to rail fare rises or even someone we could complaint to. In an industry which increasingly ‘manages by committee’, and lacks overall accountability, I’m not even sure I’d know who is ultimately responsible for deciding on fares strategy. Rail industry professionals all conveniently grumble about fares being too high, but they all look at the problem as though the buck stops elsewhere. I’m not actually sure the buck stops anywhere and that’s the issue.
Another challenge is that most rail industry top brass, haven’t a Scooby-Doo, the price of train fares, nor do they really care. I recall a few years ago, being at a mate’s party and meeting up with a TOC director responsible for customer satisfaction. In the course of a 30-minute discussion during which he talked incessantly about the minutiae of his life and didn’t once wonder what I might have got up to in the two decades since we last met, I asked whether he ever thought of leaving the mainstream rail industry, maybe working for a supplier or in an entrepreneurial role. With no shortage of arrogance, he looked down his nose on me, with my maverick portfolio bereft of guaranteed employment and said ‘why would I do that? I’ve a final salary railway pension, guaranteed job and free travel’. And that’s part of the problem rail customers face – a sector with cossetted, unambitious, corporate time-servers, in which doing the job for the thrill of delighting customers and being immersed in the needs and nuances of local markets isn’t really a motivating factor. I’m actually counting down until GBR is created as hopefully, we’ll get some fresh blood in senior roles to lift us out of going through the motions mediocrity.
Back to the price of Big Macs, coke and Cheltenham. Whilst I am deeply worried about the unabated rise in the first two, I do hope that crowds continue to plummet for the Cheltenham Festival and that they along with a few other pastimes, such as pop concerts, Premier League football and theatres, to name but a few, also realise you can only push customers so far. There’s talk of a boycott on Council Tax payments over the coming months, in response to continued increases and declining public services in return, so maybe we are moving towards an era of greater militancy among the people? Will the historically somewhat inward-looking rail industry and a government that demands cost reductions on the one hand and caves into trade union pay demands on the other, bother to look at market forces elsewhere and the effects of just seeing customers as a choiceless cash cow that can be taken for granted? These March fare increases may just be a watershed moment. Meanwhile, now that we have met for the first time, I’m keeping a watchful eye on Ely as it feels to me like a metaphor for all that’s wrong right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
Eye-watering price hikes can’t continue
by Passenger Transport on Mar 20, 2025 • 5:59 pm No CommentsThe drop in attendances at this year’s Cheltenham Festival should serve as a warning against treating rail users as cash cows
I had one of those earth-shattering, eyebrow raising afternoons last Tuesday when psychological price thresholds being broken were at the forefront of my mind. Three in the space of a few hours. The first was being charged over £7 for a medium Big Mac meal in McDonald’s. I’d always thought that hell would freeze over when the £5 barrier – avoided for so many years by Ronald and his gang – was breached, but then we moved from there to over £7 so frenetically quickly. Then, I was charged £4.45 for a bottle of coke in a boozer (‘it’s the sugar tax, mate’ lamented the landlord). The final denouement to my afternoon of game-changing sadness was the £22.80 off peak single fare from Ely to Norwich! Even if the fares went up earlier this month, there’s definitely no sugar-coating the fact that something’s not quite right about this price for a 51-minute trip.
I don’t know much about Ely in truth, in fact I’ve never really been there before. I was travelling down from York to Norwich and found myself needing to change there and buy a ticket as I didn’t have one for the last leg of my journey. It wasn’t just the price that shocked me, it was the disparity in the two legs of my trip. York to Peterborough in a matter of no time whatsoever – I had a quick snooze and we were pulling into the station, but then I kind of assumed it would be a doddle to go east to Norwich. I’d always had this perception the two locations were sort of co-joined – I mean it’s not called ‘Norwich and Peterborough’ building society for nothing and back in the day of genuine cross country networks, there always seemed to be a decent, fairly frequent and connecting service linking Anglia with access to the North and Scotland. Now, I had to change at Ely and wait over an hour for my ‘connection’. The bar on the featureless station was cold and miniscule so instead I hung round the Tesco across the road – it was certainly not an experience I’d like to repeat.
There will be countless ‘Elys’ across the UK whereby bus and coach companies could rise to the challenge of providing a cost-effective alternative. At what point does the rail industry accept defeat on certain flows and realise that actually taking a ‘transport solution’ perspective is better than just trying to kid itself that rail is the answer? Harrogate to Leeds, where Transdev Blazefield trumps Northern any day or time of the week, for starters.
The response to complaints about high fares is that the industry is too expensive to operate without customers feeling the pain in terms of prices. Short of a few logical cost reductions, maybe the answer is to look at those flows where the train fare is too high or it’s too pricey and complicated to design a network proposition that hangs together so that there will always be connections and instead subsidise and market a bus and coach alternative? That doesn’t mean ripping up railway track as it will still be needed but not just as a Peterborough or Ely to Norwich solution? Of course, we already have the Excel bus service run by First between Peterborough and Norwich – perhaps make it a GBR branded route in the future and invest in faster journey times, more limited stopping, increased frequency, high profile marketing and further improve bus priority measures on the approach to both major locations.
My price point-breaking Tuesday was followed in the following days by interesting debate on social media around the drop in attendances at this year’s Cheltenham Festival. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather spend an evening at horrific rail awards events than attend Cheltenham but I found the discussion intriguing. It seems as if the market has turned around and stuck two fingers up at profiteers who thought that there was no limit to what they could charge for a pint at the racing, or accommodation in and around the town, alongside entry and generally a lack of customer service all-round, combined with suited and booted, coke-snorting chavs ruining the ambience for everyone. Even the £9 shuttle bus fare to the venue has been roundly criticised. It’s a bit like the test match at the Oval last year when eye-wateringly high admission prices were the catalyst for swathes of empty seats. There is no such thing as a guaranteed captive audience – even for great sporting traditions.
Transport needs to wake up to the Cheltenham effect. It’s a salutary reminder that the couch or bar is increasingly a threat. Post Covid, home and online entertainment has been viewed all-round as a palatable alternative to actually being there. Shortcomings in customer service that might have been tolerated before, are seen as a bigger issue now and the reason not to make the trip. Whilst watching in the local bar might still involve a short bus journey to get there, few, if any will need to catch a train to do so.
Back in the day, it was cheaper and easier to get to the game, in any case. Even when my beloved Crystal Palace were languishing in the doldrums fighting relegation from the old second division, there’d always be a special train to the match, or at the very least a few subsidised carriages on a scheduled service.
I remember in 1985, we chartered a special to our away game at Sheffield United with half the train segregated for Palace fans and the rest for Millwall oiks, with the train continuing to Barnsley for their match. Costs were split, but arrangements such as these were a familiar sight with the rail network full to the brim with loco-hauled special trains on Saturdays the length and breadth of the UK.
It comes back to not only this brazen complacency about there always being demand, but also a lack of understanding about markets. How much analysis was carried out not just regarding pricing at the racecourse, but in totality around the cost of an overall trip to Cheltenham and the experience, when the proposition and other costs for customers were evaluated? Hotels, train and bus companies, restaurants and anyone else that profits from the festival have had their comeuppance. So too, not enough detailed analysis goes into the individual fares thrust upon rail customers. Whilst Ely is a relatively prosperous place, I bet that this wasn’t even a matter of consideration when that Super Off Peak Single was set. What’s the logic, for instance, that there doesn’t appear to be a Super Off Peak Return on Greater Anglia enabling cost-effective overnight stays, in a way that occurs on the network. I had to shell out £25 x 2 for a recent evening trip from London to Colchester returning the next day.
Rail could learn a lot from the bus industry here. Most bus companies know on a micro level the intricacies of their market and have a strong grip on their propensity to pay and their likely responsiveness to different ticketing products. They understand market forces and demographics far better than many of the highly remunerated commercial directors in train operating companies – many of whom have been sadly reduced to positions of utter powerlessness in this more centralised structure where the revenue risk isn’t taken by the operators. If they aren’t involved in bespoke train company specific marketing campaigns (and let’s face it many aren’t doing these anymore), then what exactly do they do all day? I don’t get the impression that they are instigating over granular analysis of market trends across their patches or commissioning research throughout their communities.
Even just understanding existing customer sentiment got too difficult around the time Covid kicked in, when the National Rail Passenger Satisfaction Survey was kyboshed and many in the industry got overly excited by the complicated and flawed Wavelength survey which was supposed to provide us with the ultimate market research mechanism. Now, we don’t really have anything credible.
The problem is indeed this lack of closeness to the market, combined with a Cheltenham-style arrogance that fares can be ratcheted up interminably. I’m tired of hearing platitudes around ‘fares simplification’ and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) as the answer. I really don’t trust PAYG. Last week, I went through my bank statements to see how much I had paid on some tube fares and on the same flow, Hatton Cross to London, I could see no consistency whatsoever. Contactless has just been introduced at my local station, Shepperton and I’m still not convinced whether it’s SWR or Transport for London debiting my account, nor whether I need to tap out when I return home, as per on the Tube (there’s no signage explaining what we need to do). Typically, there’s nothing telling customers that contactless doesn’t enable Railcard discounts. Of course, there’s not, it wouldn’t surprise me if the industry is at some point forced to do away with railcards.
All this would be more bearable (sort of) if we could ever feel that there was an end to rail fare rises or even someone we could complaint to. In an industry which increasingly ‘manages by committee’, and lacks overall accountability, I’m not even sure I’d know who is ultimately responsible for deciding on fares strategy. Rail industry professionals all conveniently grumble about fares being too high, but they all look at the problem as though the buck stops elsewhere. I’m not actually sure the buck stops anywhere and that’s the issue.
Another challenge is that most rail industry top brass, haven’t a Scooby-Doo, the price of train fares, nor do they really care. I recall a few years ago, being at a mate’s party and meeting up with a TOC director responsible for customer satisfaction. In the course of a 30-minute discussion during which he talked incessantly about the minutiae of his life and didn’t once wonder what I might have got up to in the two decades since we last met, I asked whether he ever thought of leaving the mainstream rail industry, maybe working for a supplier or in an entrepreneurial role. With no shortage of arrogance, he looked down his nose on me, with my maverick portfolio bereft of guaranteed employment and said ‘why would I do that? I’ve a final salary railway pension, guaranteed job and free travel’. And that’s part of the problem rail customers face – a sector with cossetted, unambitious, corporate time-servers, in which doing the job for the thrill of delighting customers and being immersed in the needs and nuances of local markets isn’t really a motivating factor. I’m actually counting down until GBR is created as hopefully, we’ll get some fresh blood in senior roles to lift us out of going through the motions mediocrity.
Back to the price of Big Macs, coke and Cheltenham. Whilst I am deeply worried about the unabated rise in the first two, I do hope that crowds continue to plummet for the Cheltenham Festival and that they along with a few other pastimes, such as pop concerts, Premier League football and theatres, to name but a few, also realise you can only push customers so far. There’s talk of a boycott on Council Tax payments over the coming months, in response to continued increases and declining public services in return, so maybe we are moving towards an era of greater militancy among the people? Will the historically somewhat inward-looking rail industry and a government that demands cost reductions on the one hand and caves into trade union pay demands on the other, bother to look at market forces elsewhere and the effects of just seeing customers as a choiceless cash cow that can be taken for granted? These March fare increases may just be a watershed moment. Meanwhile, now that we have met for the first time, I’m keeping a watchful eye on Ely as it feels to me like a metaphor for all that’s wrong right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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