Rail travellers have been struggling to plan their trips to and from Manchester this weekend after Avanti West Coast delayed releasing tickets or a full timetable. While Manchester Pride celebrations get underway in the city and England's cricket team take on South Africa at Old Trafford, passengers have been left frustrated as they are unable to plan their travel for the bank holiday weekend.
Just one third of its usual services are running along the London to Manchester route - while tickets for this Sunday and Monday are only being made available this evening (August 26). In 2019, an estimated 170,000 visitors flocked to Manchester city centre for Pride celebrations, which take place throughout the bank holiday weekend.
Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, has raised concerns about the situation following a meeting with the company yesterday. In a statement issued this afternoon, he said: "Passengers are contacting me to complain that the Avanti website is slow to release tickets for sale and pushes people towards more expensive options like open returns or buying two singles.
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"Even today, tickets for travel on Bank Holiday Monday have not been released. People pay sky-high prices to travel on Avanti West Coast trains and I made it crystal clear to the company when I met them yesterday that none of the above is good enough."
Avanti is advising customers to keep checking for updates on the timetable throughout the weekend. A spokesperson for the rail operator said: “We apologise for the delay in tickets being made available today for this weekend.
"This was due a fault in the industry system which uploads our advance tickets to our website to be sold. This has since been fixed and we are expecting the remaining tickets for Sunday and tickets for Monday to be available from this evening.
"We are sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers. By having a reduced train service, we are having to finalise our timetable in journey planners at short notice which means we are unable to release tickets as quickly as we’d like to.
"We are trying to give our customers as much information as we can regarding ticket availability on our website and across our social media channels. We would advise them to check these channels for the latest updates.”
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