Goodness no, terrible tradition, duelling. Also, Stuving was bang on the nail. Also, I'm grateful for anyone prepared to wade into issues of fares. Thanks for offering though.

Mark

Mark

 
Busted. :-)

Also, thanks for checking.

I felt like I was panning for gold. I have since found that the thing is purchaseable from the machines at Bath Spa. After putting in a set of conditions, there it was, gleaming in the pan at the heavy end of the the handful of gravel and sand.

Also, I found that the Trainline web site seems to have a different (and again hard to expose) name for a travelcard zone 1 to 6  - if it's the same thing they call it a London *Underground* zone 1 to 6. Someone's going to have to go and break the news to the likes of Anerley Station or perhaps Loughborough Junction...

Mark

 

Mark, if you require a second in any subsequent duel, I'm free! 

 

But I don't think that's the problem. Your stereotype is quite likely to just fill in what's asked for: where to, when, coming back? - and press "go". The difficult bit, as everyone acknowledges, is making sense of the choice of ticket types and fares that comes up next. (Mark's problem was he was trying to be too clever, of course.)

 
So, for the proverbial 'little old lady, living in Bradford on Avon, who wants to visit her sister whom is still living in East London', how does she do all of that - with perhaps limited access / experience of the internet?

She won't: she will take a bus / coach journey instead.  And probably pay less. 

 
I don't know where you were putatively travelling from, but from Bath Spa I can get both GWR.com and BRFares to work fine - but perhaps not by doing the obvious. It all depends on what you mean by "destination".

For BRFares, you enter an actual station as destination, but it lists tickets/fares under technical railway-internal destinations. To get offered travelcards, you need to enter a station you could get to using one. So that's a London terminus (Paddington), somewhere before that (e.g. Ealing Broadway), or somewhere beyond that (e.g. a tube station). You will then be offered a range of technical destinations, i.e. a station, London Terminals, or various of those weird zonal things; London Zones 1-6 should be offered if it's meaningful. In the list you get, for each of those there is a range of ticket types; for London Zones 1-6 you are only offered the various Travelcards.

For GWR, I picked Paddington as destination (though other valid travelcard destinations do work) and you then must choose a return and times both on the same day. In the list of trains you have to choose one to be offered a list of ticket types, and the day travelcards should be in that. (It does not seem to offer period travelcards if you specify a return on a later date.) Of course the actual train time chosen is now not important, though off-peak limits still apply.

 
All sounds straightforward…not.

 
Tested the GWR app, and that fails in a different way, 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' is findable, but 'No fares available'.

On the GWR web site, and logged in, and therefore the search being successful, regarding the ticket's restriction code, the site would still refer the user to the National Rail site, where they need to repeat the search. This is not trivial...

I've also tested brfares.com and *it* can't find e.g. 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' so no avenue to check the restriction code there.

tl:dr - if you need a 'London Travelcard' destination use a ticket office or log in to the GWR app and that works. After which, take care not to be bitten by a ticket restriction as some of them aren't intuitive, especially if you're venturing into South Western Railways territory with a ticket covering a route that they've priced themselves.

Mark

 
Ah: using the GWR web site, once you're logged in to your GWR account, 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' is listed on the booking system and no need to go to the accessible version. What an odd quirk.

This isn't so helpful on, say, the national rail site as it doesn't run an account-based model and presumably remembers previous searches using cookies.

Mark

Update: using the above, the travelcard destinations might be findable but the system can then find no fares so this isn't working either. Use the accessible booking engine though, and tickets are found, priced and purchaseable

 
Ah. One way to find the likes of 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' as a destination: use GWR's web site and switch to the accessible booking tool, and they're available there.

Mark

 
Checking various ticket sales sites + the national rail web site, within the last few days, the 'London Travelcard Zones 1-6' etc have gone from the list of destinations offered.

Mark