JFC Travel Blog

The new National Express East Coast franchise has started today. Although I do have my doubts as to whether the franchise will be a success (as I believe they’ve overbid for the franchise like GNER did in 2005) and I’ll miss the GNER branding, I do wish them well for the future and hope that they prove me wrong with regards to their bid. They have ideas for the future, some are totally new ideas and others are based on GNER’s original 2005 bid, if they can deliver and remain profitable then travelling the East Coast route will still remain a pleasure.

One immediate change standard class passengers will notice is that WiFi is now free in both classes, this is sure to increase the popularity of the service. I used WiFi regularly when travelling first class but rarely when travelling in standard.

Changes to GNER operations will be made gradually and so the regular catering offering will continue, in 2008 NXEC want to improve on this offering based on feedback and demand. Whether these will be improvements in the positive sense or ‘improvements’ in the marketing sense we’ve yet to see but I’m sure they will continue to maintain the popular aspects of GNER service and change any items that are not popular.

The new winter timetables on the National Rail network also started today, the initial NXEC timetable is very similar to the previous GNER timetable.

If you travel this route frequently it’s worth giving NXEC your feedback, if you’re a frequent traveller they certainly want to keep your custom. Continuing to honour the GNERtime (frequent traveller programme) and GNER365 (for annual season ticket holders) benefits is a good start. Hopefully when they announce their new scheme it will offer similar benefits.
On the downside, fares are continuing to rise for those who need flexible tickets, for me, the main benefit of the train is the turn up and go nature of the service - I don’t want to be tied to particular trains. Although flexible rail tickets are still significantly cheaper than flexible airfares it is now getting to the point that flexible tickets are out of the budget for many people. Unfortunately with high franchise payments there’s no option but to continue raising flexible fares while keeping the restricted fares cheap to fill the remaining seats.
The excellent benefits of GNERtime helped justify the increasingly high price of flexible travel so I hope that NXEC has something similar in the pipeline.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Rail, GNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.