Train passenger have wasted £700million on tickets they've been unable to use, according to one study.
Just shy of 80% of passengers who have missed a train have been forced to rebook their train tickets due to changed travel plans, with two thirds spending up to £100 doing so.
Like plane travel, opting to go via rail often means a lack of flexibility in terms of changing your scheduled departure time if you have a post-booking issue.
Every year, two-thirds of the 1.8bn rail tickets sold in the UK are advance tickets requiring passengers to take the specific train they are booked on.
One in five people surveyed admitted they show up more than 30 minutes early due to fears of missing their pre-booked train, such is the fear of a ride going to waste.
The pressure to be at the station on time has led 27% of people surveyed to leave work events early, one fifth (19%) have cut their holidays short, and one in 10 have left festivals early.
One way around the problem of a wrongly booked ticket is the new TrainSwap, an app from SeatFrog which lets people swap their train tickets if they can no longer make a service, for a fee from £2.50 per ticket.
The service should help people save money on their wrongly booked tickets and avoid the effort of having to find someone else who can take the journey in your place.
Iain Griffin, CEO and co-founder of Seatfrog, said: “ It’s easy to buy a cheap, advance ticket, but it’s complicated, costly and stressful to change tickets if our plans change. We want rail to enable life, rather than getting in the way of it.
"So from today, we’re letting passengers swap trains and change tickets in just a couple of taps on the Seatfrog app.
“This lack of rail flexibility means people are leaving dates, missing gigs, cutting work events short or finding themselves stuck on the concourse when they could be putting the kids to bed.
"We’re making it much easier for people to change plans and swap to a different train, with zero stress or time wasted queuing in the station or ringing customer service to book new tickets.”
The beta version of the app is currently available online and lets users exchange tickets on Northern and LNER routes.
