North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Unlimited times for one year.

Tom

 

Wow, what a steal...and although strictly within the letter of the law someone using that 200 times to visit a volunteer supported charity wants to look in the mirror in my book

 

Which is why I don't see how you can calculate the 20% return free rate quoted in post 4946 until the year is up. Surely there will still be a lot of validity out there to be used.

 

Free returns for the rest of the year.
As the annual pass (it was called that) for £49.50 has been withdrawn, surely the board members advocating the arrangements should resign.

 

Because each further ticket is issued only when the original evidence of purchase has been presented at a booking office accurate data on take up of the free return facility is available. That showed that the assumption that uptake would be around 20% of total sales of the full line ticket proved to be correct.

 

Probably of more interest and importance is what percentage of total passenger numbers were ‘free’ tickets? From what you have said that should be a readily available figure.

 

You do make some astute observations and ask some embarrassing questions, Tom. Not that they are unique. A lot of people have been saying this ever since the scheme was proposed.

 

And until the ticket is a year old ,as others have said ,you don’t accurately know the repeat uptake ..
If I bought a ticket on 24/8/24 and used it 24/8/24 and 25/8/24 and having decided in 2025 to visit a week earlier to use of 17/8/25 and 18/8/25 (assuming those are running days in 2025 ,I haven’t looked )…what percentage of repeat business have I currently made v eventually will make per NYMR records of repeat business ?
Is a 20% uptake the same whether I make 1 or 25 return visits in a year ..?
Your statistics are about as relevant as one of those customer questionnaires where you contrive the question to get the answer you want to receive .
I sadly expect Steve to not receive a simple percentage answer to his simple question above ..

 

If the uptake of use of the repeat journey is 20% of gift aided tickets sold, ( I don’t know if we have that proportion so let’s say 75% ) then surely the proportion of travelers in the year who are riding for “free” will be total ticket sales x 75% x 20%??. 15% on average on any day.

I’d guess that the pattern though is probably 1/3 using the repeat within a week, maybe more, 1/3 using it 6 months later and the rest scattered. Probably a bell curve of sorts but biased towards the start. If I am right then that probably means that capacity during the busiest periods is pushed because there might be 20% or more returning passengers who bought a ticket earlier in the week.

Pure speculation on my part.

 

I think that’s harsh. Uptake as 20% reads quite clearly as 1 in 5 day tickets were “free”. That statistic, not the occasional very heavy user, should be what is considered for the return to NYMR.

On all other points, I agree entirely with @Jamessquared about the change this year, and the impression it leaves.

The only possible salvation may be that demand is too heavily weighted to tourists for the Facebook comments to be representative of actual customer behaviour. I’m not convinced of that, as the new arrangements require a visitor to pay more to Gift Aid, and the incentive is a lot less exciting - and doesn’t shift responsibility on to the customer to use either.

 

Sorry ,but I interpret it as one in five purchases saw repeat use (whether once or multiple times ..hence the request for clarity ) and until the ticket is a year old and no further repeat visits available then the data is incomplete .With the all singing ,all dancing ticket office machines the information should be available as to how many expired tickets have seen repeated use ,how many unexpired tickets have seen repeated use , how many free day tickets have been issued ,and average number of repeat visits per expired tickets .
All the management want to share with the membership is the amount of gift aid claimed .

 

That’s not my reading of the 20% statistic. My interpretation is that, of the gift aided tickets sold, 20% of people make a second or more visit. The statistic needed is, of all the bums on seats, what percentage of them have not paid on the day? I suspect it is significantly more than any 20% over the year.
I’ve previously mentioned a friend who has now gone five times in his, still ongoing, 12 months and who would have typically gone three times in the past. Accepting one might be the steam gala, on today’s price he would have paid £99 instead of £49.50. The railway would now get £61.87 with the Gift Aid so is actually worse off by doing it. I suspect there are a lot of people like him.

 

I’m of the opinion that those on holiday in the district will only travel once. Would you visit a similar attraction twice in your one or two week holiday? I’d suggest that the repeat visits are more likely to come from those more local who would go for days out at weekends and holidays and the retired who can go at any time. It would be another interesting statistic but one we are unlikely to see.

 

While I stand by my interpretation, the fact that we can in good faith disagree demonstrates why clarification is required

 

A further point perhaps worthy of consideration is the incentive to visit in the first place. I wonder how many people wouldn’t have travelled at all without the added incentive? Also, unless the trains are full to capacity, then what is the actual cost to the railway of the free returns?

 

Thanks for that. So is it reasonable to add 'at this point in time' to the last sentence. At close of 2024 business the running mean (not median) trip rate was around 1.2 trips per pass? So with some kind of distribution such as @21B suggests, the final outturn come September is bound to be somewhat higher?

I agree there will be significant numbers of folk from the region, York, Hull and W Yorks who will have made one trip last year and will make a second this year. Then there will be the annual holiday on the coast brigade.

I absolutely agree with @Sheff, there will have been a significant incentive effect on top of the Gift aid effect, so you cannot say a priori what is a good or bad number.

 

From personal experience some trains late last year were full to bursting making for a less than ideal experience, with quite a proportion using their annual pass and accompanied by their children all travelling free. Whilst I support the annual pass idea not sure how it would even work on a 5-day railway.

The 20% of passengers using their annual pass more than once, as stated by Lineisclear, and given that some of this returnees use it more than once (I’ve witnessed some returnees using their pass multiple times) suggests on any given train some 25% of passengers using an annual pass, which concurs with my own simple observations. Some have suggested that the returnees have secondary spend on the railway eg teashops / buffet car etc, but I would suggest the major recipient of this secondary spend would be the fish and chip shops in Whitby…

 

You might visit an attraction twice if there were good reasons for doing so. Going to Whitby might be one, and that more or less sells itself, but as I keep saying, the real advertising and development focus has to be on making the railway itself a worthy attraction in its own right, which at the moment doesn't seem to be the case in either way.

 

I suggest that point has been taken. As Sidmouth4me suggests the free return in 12 months model is less attractive with five day working but the other feature of that Gift Aid option was that only five operating days could be excluded. That limits the financial potential of Special Events which will be enhanced this year.