A report by the consumer organisation Which? — claiming that train passengers are receiving poor advice from rail staff — has itself been called “seriously misleading” by the body representing train operators.

A team from Which? asked station ticket office staff and NRES (National Rail Enquiries Service) staff about the cheapest way to take specific turn-up-and-go journeys by train. The magazine reported that two in three station staff and two in five NRES staff failed to quote the cheapest fare.

Where there was a choice of train company, Which? said its team was quoted the more expensive fare 27 out of 50 times, with 80 per cent of station ticket offices ignoring the cheaper option. In some cases, the fare quoted was more than double the cheapest available option, Which? claimed.

ATOC Chief Executive Michael Roberts hit back, saying:  “This report is seriously misleading. Independent research last year, using a sample of passengers fifty times the size used by Which? and based on the kind of questions most commonly asked by passengers, found that the correct information on rail fares was given 99% of the time.”

Mr Roberts said ATOC conducts an annual comprehensive national mystery shopping survey every year for the Department for Transport, which is undertaken by a third party organisation. This is a regulatory requirement, he explained

He said a survey conducted between May and September 2008 by GfK NOP, involved 7,500 station shopping exercises, 600 internet shopping exercises and 2,400 telesales shopping exercises.

“The overall results for our 2008 survey showed a 99.1% accuracy rate. The internet and telesales surveys involved different scenarios, covering the full range of common ticket requirements. In the case of the internet exercise, the accuracy rate was 100%, whilst for the telesales exercise the rate was 98.7%.”
 
By contrast, said Mr Roberts, the Which? survey involved 200 questions based on 20 different journeys, split between conversations at station ticket offices and with National Rail Enquiries’ call centre staff.

ATOC’s response is supported by the Office of Rail Regulation’s ‘National Rail Trends, 2008-2009 Yearbook,’ published earlier this month.

The ORR requires at least 95 per cent accuracy to be measured by ‘mystery shoppers’ — but in the January-March 2009 period mystery shoppers recorded correct information was given during 99.3 per cent of calls made.

Although mystery shopping has always recorded accuracy above the 95 per cent target set by the Department for Transport, achieving a 99.3 per cent figure during this period was exceptional. The ORR commented: “Results are inflated for 2008-09 Q4 owing to an increase in demand in February 2009 due to the heavy snow.”

The ORR explained: “Mystery shopping is carried out by Taylor Nelson Sofres [a global market research specialist agency] and measures solely the accuracy of information provided by the [NRES] advisors.

 “There are ten scenarios that cover the most common call types such as timetable, walk-on and advance fares and also less common but sensitive call types like mobility impaired and complaints. Each of the ten call type scenarios have a percentage weighting attached to them depending on the volume of calls received on the scenario.”