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IT’S TRUE!
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not a support questionScotrail has now stopped offering bicycle reservations online. I travel Edinburgh London regularly always with a bike. LNER are the same, and using their telephone booking system (the only way to ensure a space when you book a ticket) is < rule 2 > rubbish.
Virgin used to allow it and they stopped; now Scotrail. Why?
AUGH. Is this permanent? If so I'm going to yell at them on Twitter. Again.
Oh no. I always buy all the tickets for my bicycle adventures from Scotrail, including for other TOCs. How annoying and depressing.
I used redspottedhanky a month ago. Any luck with them?
Are you trying to do it on a mobile? I think this came up before - if you do it on the mobile site the option doesn't appear. I've just checked on my laptop and the bike booking option is there, once you've chosen your trains
“the only way to ensure a space when you book a ticket”
Understand the desire to make sure you only buy tickets on a train where there are still spaces for bikes, but presume they will still reserve bikes via DM on Twitter.
I’ve done this a few times and they usually respond in about 5 minutes.
Should be possible to reserve a seat on-line - and book a bike space before you have to press pay.
I tried on my laptop for a few options for festive period rides and they all said reservations were unavailable.
@sallyhinch It was me that raised it in respect of Virgin who stopped offering online bike reservations. This ever helpful forum put me onto Scotrail so I used that for a while, but now they appear to have stopped too. Their website advises to phone for the bike reservation. There was a mobile/pc issue but I don't think that's the problem here.
Apparently a temporary glitch only...
https://twitter.com/ScotRail/status/1070567172727103488?s=19
Thanks @HankChief, I hope you're right. In the end I booked by phone using LNER. Call was almost certainly to the other side of the world, and the call handler had to email someone, with me on hold for 5 minutes, to reserve the bike space. The passenger and the bike reservations are clearly on two entirely separate systems.
I book my bicycle at a railway station. Not convenient for some I know but at least the staff are helpful.
The National Rail ticketing system is very old & very fragile, it broke for over 6 months in 2005, when an upgrade was attempted. The 3 month rolling window on sealed train times (T Minus 12) cannot simply be a data file transfer from Network Rail's master data system, the system is so old.
To deliver seat reservations, the TOC must subscribe all or parts of their train services to this facility, and the rules are 1 seat reservation for each ticket for that part of the journey. To provide cycle reservations a virtual coach was put on that train, where each bike space = a seat. Unfortunately this immediately breaks the rules (2 seat reservations for the ticket(s) on trains which have reservable seats)...
Staff need to be trained in the 'right' way to abuse the ticketing system to issue cycle reservations. For season ticket users with TPE in Manchester it can take 10 minutes to create a dummy ticket, on which the bike travels with its reserved seats, & voiding fares .... separately for each of the 10 trips..
The MixingDeck ticket sales suite used initially by GNER, had an operating feature which could manage bike reservations. Now the phone app systems are changing the options for this part of the ticket sales package. Likewise the increasing delivery of electronic seat reservation downloads to the train/guard's iPhone enables direct, real time reservations, rather than printing the reservations (often at a central location) and delivering those tags to the train, to slip into the seats, or for TPE bike spaces, under the coach identity label stuck on the window.... It really is that crude & improvised!
The final twist is that every day at 00.01
all of the seat reservations, & unsold AP fares are transferred to the host TOC, and with Cross Country the first to do so, the unsold cheap fares, were made available, online/via phone app Their social media them (& call centre) also secured a coup, by offering access through them to reserve bike spaces.
The fudged system also means that 2 clerks can double-book spaces through this offline process, as has happened on some Scotrail Oban trains.
GWR has put bike reservations in to their phone app upgrade, and were asking for cyclists to test this, for GWR services only.
Scotrail's proposal for the special bike carriages, also poses a challenge in managing the vastly increased by Never of spaces. Hence the reaction to the 'exclusive' story that broke in The Scotsman, before Scotrail & Transport Scotland had properly worked through and tested this aspect of the 'new' carriages.
@Rosie has the solution which the late Ian Pragnall used for booking groups on to West Highland trains in 1990's. He made all bookings with Fort William station - boosting their ticket sales, and getting access to staff with great knowledge of the available services, rather than a contractor with minimal training, and for the Independent resellers, tacit policy of avoiding transactions which don't deliver any income (e.g. Train line used to charge a collection fee where most TOC don't)
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