What we'd like to see from a new East Coast

It's time to ensure that going forward the East Coast franchise needs to remember to be more customer focused. Although it's easy to think of the VTEC route as a captive market there's actually a lot of competition.

The future of VTEC

At the moment there's a lot of information going round saying that Stagecoach can't meet their financial obligations with Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC) but it's difficult to accurately comment until we get further information.

Cycling on Virgin Trains

This is about Virgin Trains West Coast. I normally write about East Coast but this is the blog section and I can be off topic. My blog post about bikes on Virgin Trains East Coast actually talked about the booking engine (which has sadly been replaced) more than the actual experience of taking the bike on the train. As that was my first trip taking my bike on a train I had nothing else to compare it to.

The Virgin Trains East Coast website announces:

Good news, foodies. We’ve made eating onboard even easier.

Don't assume misogyny

To quote Wikipedia...

Whenever the press notice the prices of anytime tickets there follows a bunch of articles where they compare a ticket bought on the day with a cheap holiday flight bought well in advance.

There's two main points -

For the second year in a row Heathrow Airport has cut the fees charged to airlines operating domestic flights. The intention of this is to encourage airlines to start new domestic destinations in the hope to gather more support for airport expansion from these areas. Heathrow is billing the 3rd runway as a project that benefits the whole of the UK so they want to ensure there's services from all areas of the UK to Heathrow to connect to their global network of flights.

Many media outlets, including the BBC, decided to give prominent position to a 'sexist' Tweet sent by ^MS from @Virgin_TrainsEC. The Tweet has now been deleted (mistakenly in my opinion) and at the time of writing this it's unclear whether VTEC have taken any additional action.

Train, plane or car? I suspect that this is one of the few times that driving might win, but as I've worked most of my life in London I've never seen the need to own a car so I can't be certain. But I can imagine there must be some pleasure sitting in your own space not having to worry about the aisles blocked with other people's luggage and worrying about space for your own.

This blog post is by ^DH, views my own!

One of my biggest annoyances of 2017 with Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC) was their implementation of new technology. I remember speaking to David Horne at the first York VTEC Airtime event back in 2015 and he shared my enthusiasm for using technology to improve the customer experience. But if you see my Tweets now you might not believe I want things to move forward. I urge people not to use VTEC mobile tickets, I mock their attempts at innovation, it doesn't sound like someone who really wants VTEC to lead the way with technology.