Rail travellers pay over the odds as staff left baffled by fare deals, says Which?

Undercover Which? researchers asked rail staff for advice on the cheapest fare for 150 train journeys. Which? said that 59 per cent of station ticket clerks and 43 per cent of operators on the National Rail Inquiries line failed to advise passengers about cheaper options available.

In nine out of 10 cases, a passenger hoping to make two round trips from Oxford to Cardiff in a week was advised to buy two return tickets costing £200 each.

Just one clerk advised that buying a weekly season ticket would save the passenger £112.

Which? also said that it had difficulty getting correct answers while searching for cheaper fare options on the nationalrail.co.uk website. In addition, Which? surveyed 1,515 people who had travelled by train in the last 12 months. Only half felt confident that they knew how to get the best possible fare for their journey while 54 per cent were satisfied overall with train services.

Which? chief executive Peter Vicary-Smith said: “Train operators seem blind to the fact that their ticketing systems are too complicated.

“If people who do this for a living can’t find the cheapest fare, what hope do passengers have?

“We’d like to see much clearer signposting to help passengers find the best deals available, whether they’re buying tickets online, over the phone or at a station.”

A spokesman for the Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc) said: “This (Which? report) is seriously misleading and misrepresentative. Asking 150 questions on unrealistic and obscure scenarios cannot come close to giving a representative view of the 1.3 billion journeys that are made every year by train. The researchers haven’t actually asked for the cheapest ticket in all the scenarios and even where they have done, they have explicitly excluded the cheapest fares.”

Atoc went on: “The Which? claim that only 54 per cent of passengers are satisfied with train services needs to be treated with a great deal of caution.

“Even though the magazine only surveyed 1,500 people, it claims its research is ‘more accurate’ than that of the independent watchdog Passenger Focus, which twice a year samples more than 27,000 passengers and whose latest survey found that 84 per cent were satisfied with train services.”