RAIL
WE CAN SAVE A COMPANY 4-5 PER CENT OF ITS TOTAL RAIL TRAVEL BUDGET
Matt Freckelton says: “Our average claim value is £44, and we can recoup up to 3 per cent of a company’s rail spend, rising to 7 per cent when all operators move to the 15-minute threshold. We even claimed back 0.6 per cent of a company’s annual spend with compensation arising from one particular incident when people were delayed travelling to their annual conference. “We estimate that the total delay compensation that
could be claimed back is £700 million a year – but in 2017-18 only £81 million was actually paid out, because people didn’t bother to claim.” With the latest National Rail Passenger Survey revealing that passenger satisfaction has fallen to a 10-year low, there is no end in sight to rail misery. Passengers of all types look to the Williams Review to usher in genuine change and for all of them, improvements cannot come fast enough.
THE TMC’S VIEW Josh Collier, head of proposition – rail and ground
transportation, Capita Travel and Events
THERE ARE REASONS TO GRIN AND BEAR IT. New trains have recently been introduced on Great Western, with 2019 also seeing new trains on LNER and TransPennine Express. This will help to increase capacity (up 28 per cent in LNER standard class on most journeys), and journey times will be reduced as a result of newer technology. Both CrossCountry and Virgin Trains are launching free
wifi on their trains this year. It is good to see that this is now viewed as a necessity rather than a “nice to have”, with Virgin Trains also having significantly increased wifi coverage. Further initiatives, such as Delay Repay 15 – compensating
passengers for delays of only 15 minutes – are being introduced by more train operators, including Northern. But we are still awaiting a standardised approach to compensation for delays. Lessons appear to have been learnt from the chaos
caused by last year’s timetable changes, but reliability on most operators is still below where it has been in previous years, and way below where everyone would like it to be. Rail travel remains popular for working on the move, but
the factors that prompt people to get back into their cars are overcrowding, reservations being cancelled, an unproductive working environment and unreliability. These and an inflexible travel policy could force travellers back on to the roads or into a rethink of their travel plans altogether.
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MARCH/APRIL
2019
buyingbusinesstravel.com
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