Consumer champion Which? has revealed that many train operators are using outdated ticket machines that sell tickets at significantly higher prices than available online
Mystery shoppers sent by Which? to fifteen stations around England found that passengers who buy their tickets from a ticket machine sometimes pay more than double the online price.
Station ticket machines often do not offer the cheapest fares, or make them difficult to find, resulting in charges of up to 154% more than booking online.
The mystery shoppers went in search of the cheapest single fare for a journey on that day, the following morning and three weeks later. In around three-quarters of cases, tickets bought online were cheaper.
On average, tickets for travel on the same day were 52% more expensive from the machine than online. in one example, a one-way fare from Northampton to Cardiff was £43 when bought online but £107 from a machine – more than double the price.
Which? points out that while rail companies scrapped plans to close ticket offices following strong public opposition, 759 stations do not have a ticket office at all, and only one in six of the stations under the Department for Transport's control have a ticket office that is open all the time.
As a result, many passengers still rely on ticket machines or online booking, and in 2022, around 150 million rail journeys were made with tickets bought from machines.
Ticket machines vs online fares
Which? checked the prices of seventy-five journeys at fifteen ticket machines, each owned by a different train operator, against the cheapest price available from Trainline, the UK's biggest online ticket site.
When mystery shoppers looked for the cheapest fare for travel that day, eleven of the fifteen journeys were cheaper on Trainline than at the ticket machine.
Same-day tickets – biggest price differences
| Train journey | Ticket machine | Ticket machine price | Online price * | Price difference |
| Hitchin to York | Great Northern | £133 | £55 | £78 |
| Northampton to Cardiff | London Northwestern | £107 | £43 | £64 |
| Market Harborough to Leeds | East Midlands Railway | £83 | £39 | £44 |
| Holmes Chapel to London | Northern | £66 | £26 | £40 |
No advance tickets
Two-thirds of the ticket machines did not sell advance tickets.
These tickets are cheaper and non-flexible, and are available up to the day of travel on many routes, sometimes up to ten minutes before the service departs.
Which? gives an example: the cheapest fare from a machine from Canley in Coventry to Cardiff was an off-peak single for £74, but it found a £27 advance fare online.
Many machines also did not seem to see off-peak tickets during peak hours. For example, a mystery shopper visited Hitchin in Hertfordshire, first thing in the morning, and tried to buy the cheapest one-way ticket to York later that day. However, the only option that the machine offered was an anytime single costing £133, more than double Trainline's cheapest fare of £55.
Great Northern runs Hitchin station and its ticket machines, and told Which? that a passenger can buy an off-peak ticket at any time by clicking the ‘Tickets for future travel' button.
However, passengers generally see this as the route to buy tickets for a later date, and two of the mystery shoppers did not click this option and ended up selecting a much more expensive fare than they needed.
Great Northern explained that, “Our ticket machines are optimised to give people fast service for the simple journeys that most people are making. If that off-peak fare were to be placed on the home screen, customers might easily select an invalid ticket if they were in a rush.”
Unclear information
Which? believes that even where machines do sell off-peak fares, passengers may still select the wrong ticket as often, the ticket machine did not display information on when the ticket was valid.
Once the booking process is completed, tiny print states that, ‘Restrictions apply – please inquire.' However, if the passenger is in a hurry and misses the small print, or there is not an open ticket office of staff available to ask, then the passenger will risk a fifty penalty fare plus the price of the correct ticket.
The magazine also reports that most of the ticket machines that its mystery shoppers tried had no timetable information.
This included Waterloo, the UK's busiest station. Passengers could not reserve a seat and could only buy fares up to a month ahead, even though tickets are usually available to buy up to three months in advance.
Smart ticket machines
Only five stations that the mystery shoppers visited had smart kiosks, which are machines which provide real-time information, sell advance fares up to three months ahead, make seat reservations, and display journey-planning information.
However, even smart machines did not always match the online price, since they do not sell split tickets.
These are the tickets which divide the journey into sections where the total fares are less than the fare for the full journey.
One mystery shopper found that a one-way fare from Holmes Chapel in Cheshire to London was £40 more expensive bought at a smart kiosk (£66) than Trainline's cheapest split ticket, which cost £26.
Splitting your journey is legal, but GWR said: ‘Current regulations do not allow train operators to recommend split tickets from ticket machines or ticket offices'.
Several train operators promised to improve their ticket machines as part of their ticket office closure proposals, using funds from the Treasury.
The research
Which? sent its mystery shoppers to the stations In October 2023, They visited Oxford, Kings Cross, Euston, Holmes Chapel, Tottenham Hale, Market Harborough, Hitchin, Canley, Northampton, Grays, Marylebone, Vauxhall, Peckham Rye, Nunhead and Deptford.
Mark Plowright, Director at Virgin Trains Ticketing, commented that, “It's important to note that the Which? report only compared against Trainline and didn't look at the value offered by other online retailers through points, rewards and other perks, so the value gap is actually much greater. Rail retail is a growing market, and competition between apps like Virgin Trains Ticketing is driving great value for customers who have a smartphone, but all rail passengers deserve to get the best value for their journey wherever they choose to buy their tickets.”
I have tried to use machines in various stations over the years and they have various interfaces but they all share a common feature – they are unintuitive and complex. These days I use online apps to check times and connections then trot off to my local station where helpful friendly staff almost invariably are able to offer me the same trains at a significant saving. On occasion this has been less than two thirds of the best price I found online. With the example of the Horizon debacle for Royal Mail, why are the rail companies even trying to suggest that this sort of technology represents progress?