Virgin Trains extends its booking horizon to six months in advance to tempt people away from air travel
LONDON, 2016-Sep-22 — /Travel PR News/ — Virgin Trains has extended its booking horizon from the industry standard of three months to six months in advance for weekday tickets on both its west coast and east coast routes.
This gives customers more time to plan holidays and secure great deals, and book tickets for big events further ahead.
Groups booking family holidays and stag dos or school trips are likely to be amongst those who benefit from the changes.
This is the latest in a series of moves by Virgin Trains to tempt people away from air travel including the new Beam streaming service allowing passengers to access hours of free films and TV series straight onto their devices.
Tickets from London – Glasgow are available from as little as £20 and London-Edinburgh from £25* allowing customers to travel from city centre to city centre, cutting overall journey times and maximising productive time on-board with Wi-Fi or relaxing with a movie.
Graham Leech, Group Commercial Director at Virgin Trains said:
“We want leisure and business passengers to choose to travel by train and we’re confident that this extended booking horizon combined with everything else we have to offer will persuade more people to switch from the inconvenience of air travel to the comfort of our trains.”
Thanks to already shorter journey times and an improved service, Glasgow-London journeys tripled in the years between 2009 and 2015. On the east coast, Virgin Trains has announced more frequent trains to Edinburgh with an extra 22,000 seats per week, whilst investing £40M into providing a better service including a new James Martin menu and refurbished trains.
Customers booking directly on VirginTrains.com or VirginTrainsEastCoast.com will benefit from no booking fees.
* Single standard class fare
Notes to Editors
On the west coast, customers can now book all routes six months in advance (Monday to Friday) and on the east coast the extended booking window is available on selected journeys between London Kings Cross and north of York (inclusive). For more information visit (https://www.virgintrains.co.uk/our-blog/tickets/2016/09/save-with-24-week-advance-bookings)
About Virgin Trains:
Stagecoach and Virgin are working in partnership to operate the East Coast and West Coast inter-city routes under the Virgin Trains brand. Together, they are on track to revolutionise rail travel across the UK.
The combined network connects some of the nation’s most iconic destinations including Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, York and London.
Virgin Trains is committed to delivering a high speed, high frequency service, offering shorter journey times, more comfortable travel and excellent customer service. Customers consistently rate Virgin Trains as one of the top long-distance rail franchise operators in the National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) commissioned by industry watchdog, Transport Focus.
On the East Coast route, £140m is being invested to create a more personalised travel experience. We have already invested £21m to completely revamp our existing fleet and customers can now benefit from 42 additional services (22,000 extra seats) per week between Edinburgh and London. 2018 will see the introduction of completely new Azuma trains being built in the UK by Hitachi.
The West Coast route has a proud record of challenging the status quo – from introducing tilting Pendolino trains, to a pioneering automated delay repay scheme and becoming the first franchised rail operator to offer m-Tickets for all ticket types.
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