(Erm, sorry, this was just going to be a quick note but it's sort of ballooned into a bit of an epic!)

Well, there is another school of thought which says that individual train companies offering such discounts just makes it that much more complicated to ensure that one secures the best price - the alternative approach would be all outlets offering all tickets at the same price regardless. (The 10% online discount offered by East Coast is after all just a discount on a fare that the company itself has set - it could just cut the underlying fare instead.)

Anyway, whilst I'm here, I might as well tell you a few extra bits and pieces which could help scholars, or indeed anyone else, stretch their budgets that little bit further...


* First off, the booking sites that use the East Coast system don't offer the GroupSave discount whatsoever - GroupSave is an offer that applies in the south east of England (the definition of which is drawn pretty widely) whereby 3 or 4 people can travel together for the price of 2 during off-peak times - this applies to 'walk-up' tickets rather than 'Advance' ones (which are basically only offered on a few routes in the south east). Trainline-based sites can offer this, though rather unintuitively you have to tick the 'Railcard' box then select either 'GroupSave' 3 or 'GroupSave 4' as appropriate - to be honest I generally wouldn't bother booking GroupSave tickets in advance but would just buy them on the day (from staffed ticket offices - self-service ticket machines don't offer this discount either ), but it can be a useful way of pricing up journeys or confirming the availability of the GroupSave discount for particular journeys.


* Secondly, East Coast has recently started offering a third-off discount for groups of 3-9 people on their Advance fares (both Standard and First class). Virgin Trains also offers a discount for small groups, though it's rather less generous.


* Thirdly, something that might well confuse you - well it confuses me a bit, and I'm the one trying to explain it! However, it's also kinda useful too. Virgin Trains offers something unique for those travelling on the west coast main line - if you are making a return journey, then you can mix and match an Advance ticket for one direction and an Off-peak or Anytime 'half' ticket for the other direction - these 'half' tickets are priced at half the Off-peak or Anytime return fare (regular Off-peak Single fares are not, by and large, half the return fare - for intercity journeys they're normally just a pound cheaper than the return - don't ask, that's just the way it is!).

All this means that you can, for example, get a cheap Advance ticket for an outbound journey on a specific train (or just get a more reasonable fare for travelling on a peak time train), and then retain some flexibility as to when you make your return journey (though the 'half' ticket does have to be used on the specified day, and if it's an Off-peak ticket it can only be used during the off-peak window). In actual fact you can also mix and match Off-peak and Anytime 'halves' too - much cheaper than buying the full-whack Anytime Return ticket, and also somewhat cheaper than buying a walk-up Anytime Single and a walk-up Off-peak Single (remember, regular Off-peak Singles are not priced at half the Off-peak Return fare!).

You can only buy these 'half' tickets as part of a return journey when booking online in advance of travel on either the Virgin Trains website, or on any other Trainline-based booking site - they cannot be bought from station ticket offices (nor are they available from websites that use the East Coast booking system, which is annoying). Also worth noting that when buying from Trainline-based sites (which includes Virgin Trains), it takes up to two hours for the booking to process through the system and the tickets to be available for collection - so don't buy a mix-and-match duo of Off-peak and Anytime 'halves' online if you want to actually get on the train within the next hour! (FWIW, tickets purchased on sites that used the East Coast sites seem to be available for collection pretty much immediately - but of course you can't buy these 'half' tickets from them! )

(All that said, if Virgin lose the franchise to run the west coast main line next year, then these useful 'half fares' might end up being history anyway!)


* Lastly (and about time too, I hear you say!), there's something called Megatrain - basically the Megabus coach company offers some cheap tickets, on a few select trains, on a limited number of routes, which can only be purchased from their website. I dare say this is only of marginal interest to people here, given the limited number of cheap tickets on offer on awkwardly timed trains, and I think they're only offered on weekday trains, and perhaps not even on Fridays either. (The rationale here is that Megabus is a Stagecoach company, and these cheap train tickets are offered on underutilised trains operated by Stagecoach-owned train companies - or in the case of Virgin Trains, 49% owned by Stagecoach.)


Anyway, why are we talking about trains - surely you should be asking how to fly to Stratford upon Avon?