Northern partner, Seatfrog, has released research which reveals the £93 million cost that people incur re-booking new seats after missing their pre-booked journeys in the North of England.
The train operator joined forces with Seatfrog in April to enable their customers with Advance Purchase tickets to benefit from greater ‘on the day’ flexibility if their travel plans changed.
Using Seatfrog, customers are able to change their ticket up until ten minutes before departure of their original train for another service departing the same day from just £2.50.
Customers who need to change their ticket should visit: https://trainswap.seatfrog.com.
Seatfrog aims to make that £93 million cost (which represents bookings across all train operators) a thing of the past by expanding its services to other train operators following their successful partnership with Northern.
Iain Griffin, CEO and co-founder of Seatfrog comments, “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.”
Mark Powles, commercial and customer director at Northern, said: “Our customers have been able to use the Seatfrog app for just over a month – and for those whose plans have changed, it’s proving popular.
“Advance Purchase tickets offer the best prices for those who can book before the day of travel, but circumstances can and do change and it’s great that we’re now able to offer customers the chance to switch trains via Seatfrog rather than have to purchase a new ticket.”
Since launching in 2018, Seatfrog has already saved consumers more than £43m across more than 3,400 destinations. Seatfrog is available to download from the App Store and Google Play.
Northern is the second largest train operator in the UK, with more than 2,500 services a day to more than 500 stations across the North of England.
