How do I save money on UK rail with online booking tools?

Having lived in London for around 7 months, I have to travel by train for about 5 days a week, which really cost me a lot. In this blog, I will share my booking experience with four different mobile apps: Trainline, National Rail Enquries, TraniSplit and TrainPal.

Most train booking apps just aim at making money from travellers, but there still exist several apps that can help you to save real money with advanced technologies. First, let's have an overview of the four apps:

1. Trainline

Trainline enables us to book both train tickets and national express coach in a single app. Besides, you can also book mobile tickets or etickets and pay by either bank card or Paypal. The whole booking experience is absolutely fluent and perfect. However, Trainline will charge you some booking fees if your departure date is not today. So I usually just use trainline to search trains but not buy tickets with it. To be honest, Trainline does not save any money for me.

2. National Rail Enquries

This is an official site for checking train timetables. However, if you want to book tickets, the website will redirect to the official sites of other train operating companies. NR provides relatively full travel information from all the major train line operators. You can also find out about train disruption quickly, track your train and save your favorite journeys. Everything is good but if I really cannot associate it with cheap fare searcher.

3. TrainSplit

TrainSplit is a great app for saving money on your train tickets. They do this by using 'Splitting' technology provided by raileasy. If you do not know what split ticketing is, please click here. You can also book other tickets such as Advance and Flexible tickets with this app. TrainSplit is the first app that I used for splitting ticketing, and it will charge some service fees for the split fare. So I just used the technology to split tickets, but purchased them individually in the local rail office or on other free booking websites.

4. TrainPal
Compared to the other three apps, TrainPal is a relatively young mobile application. Having used TrainPal for about one month, I find that it always recommends the cheapest fare for me. TrainPal is also professional in split ticketing, which has saved me an average of 40% on train fare. What’s more, TrainPal does NOT charge any booking or extra fees. As a regular customer of TrainPal, I also got a chance to change Advance tickets without any administration fees. Just like Skyscanner, TrainPal is also owned by Ctrip Group (International brand as Trip.com), so I think it is reliable.

In conclusion, Trainline and National Rail Enquires can be served as a tool to search train timetables, however, TrainSplit and TrainPal are good at searching the cheapest fare by splitting ticketing. But I prefer TrainPal since it has almost the same functionalities with Trainline but does not charge any extra fees.