How ‘split booking’ can help you get a lower fare
Rail company booking engines are designed to find and offer the lowest fares to you. But when your journey involves more than one train, they don’t always manage to do so.
There’s a simple reason and a simple solution for this.
Why ‘in one go’ online searches don’t always find the best fares
Rail tickets are grouped into types, based on certain travel conditions such as class and flexibility. Usually, the less flexible the ticket type, the lower the fare is.
If your journey involves more than one train, you need to find the lowest fare on BOTH legs of the journey.
But in order to keep things simple for the user, the booking engines follow a certain rule. They can only offer the customer a combined fare that consists of the same type of ticket on each leg of the journey.
So if there is a very cheap (ie less flexible) fare on one leg, and a more expensive (ie more flexible) ticket on the other, the online booking engine has to offer the more flexible (more expensive) tickets on both legs. The unfortunate result is you miss out on lower fares, the overall cost is higher.
The solution: split booking
Fortunately, there is a solution: split the booking.
You can do this yourself, or ask a rail company call centre agent to do it for you.
Here’s an example to illustrate how it works:
You want to travel to the ski resort of Bardonecchia, in Italy. The journey is a Eurostar to Paris, and then a TGV to Bardonecchia.
- First, try the ‘in one go’ booking. Enter ‘London St Pancras’ to ‘Bardonecchia' (return) into the search engine, and note down the combined fare offered.
- Then start again, but this time split the booking.
- Check the first leg (the Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris, return) and then the second leg (TGV from Paris to Bardonecchia, return).
- Compare the prices from each booking method (in one go, or split) and book the lower fare.
Note that if the journey involves more than three trains, eg Eurostar, TGV and a regional train at the end, the journey doesn’t, need to be split, because prices on regional trains are fixed.