A woman has revealed a simple hack for getting cheaper train tickets after Which? revealed machines are charging twice as much as Trainline.
Posting on social media platform X, Melissa Harrison explained how she was travelling from London Bridge to Brighton and went to buy tickets from the self service machine.
The cheapest “off peak day return” cost £34.10, whilst the most expensive option cost £58.40 from the machine.
After enquiring at the ticket office, she managed to get a ticket for just £14.10. Whilst this option would have been available on the machine, Melissa explained how it can be hard for passengers to navigate.
She wrote: “To be clear, the lower fare is available in the machine – but you’d have to know enough to select ‘Thameslink only’ from a sub-menu. Why is it incumbent on passengers to know this? You would think ‘All services’ would include the lowest fare. But no.”
And it appears she isn’t the only one to be nearly caught out by ticket machine prices, with consumer group Which? finding the best value fares are either unavailable or hidden among a huge number of options on many machines.
Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel magazine, said millions of tickets are bought each year meaning “huge numbers of us are potentially paying significantly more than we need to when we commute to work or visit friends and family across the country”.
He added: “Significant numbers of elderly people don’t have internet access at all – leaving them with little choice but to run the gauntlet of ticket machines which either don’t offer the best prices, or make it difficult to find the appropriate fares.”
According to reports, a staggering two out of five stations in England do not have a ticket office, leaving passengers relying on ticket machines and apps like Trainline.
In 2022, around 150 million tickets were bought from machines. Which? sent mystery shoppers to 15 stations – each run by a different train operator – to compare the price of tickets for 75 journeys offered by machines with those from online retailer Trainline.
Researchers attempted to buy the cheapest one-way ticket for travel that same day, the following morning, and in three weeks’ time.
Which? found fares purchased online were cheaper around three-quarters of the time, with travel on that day costing an average of 52 percent more from machines.
Mr Boland said: “The price differences we found between booking online and using station ticket machines were simply astounding.
“Wherever possible we’d recommend booking train tickets online for the cheapest options, but that won’t be possible for everyone.”
