National Rail tickets and 2-4-1 in London

1. Yes your friend could buy the Advance ticket for your journey to Oxford online. Not sure about the day ticket for 25 April - they are just walk up tickets.

2. Both stations are in the same area of London so it hardly matters

3. Yes buy ASAP. To collect train tickets bought online your friend will need the booking reference and the credit card used to purchase the tickets.

Some tickets bought online offer print at home or etickets which are suitable for 2for1s https://www.daysoutguide.co.uk/faqs

How are you travelling within London are you using a paper Travelcard rather than the Oyster?

The Churchill Rooms are an easy walk from Charing Cross station. If you picked up your tickets there it would resolve all the complicated collection issues.

What ticket(s) are you intending to get to cover the days of 25-30 April for the 2-for-1 offer? It isn't clear from what you have written.

If you think you can get away each day with tickets between two close by SWT stations on the line into Waterloo, you may very well come a cropper as this wheeze has been rumbled and the place you are visiting has the right to deny you the offer under the current terms if you present them.

Ramblin' on, thank you. Planning to use the Oyster rather than the paper Travelcard because it's easier to keep up with. Your idea to pick up the tickets at Charing Cross station is helpful.
Marco, I'm not trying to scam anybody, just use the offer on the National Rail website and stay within the rules.
"If you are making a return journey, you can use your National Rail tickets and offer vouchers any day on or between your outward and return journeys. For example, if you arrived on Thursday and will return on Sunday, your tickets will be considered valid for the offers on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday."

Ruth you need to read more of the rules than you have. In particular this, which is immediately below what you quoted:

"All tickets should show that you have travelled to the attraction by train, whether that be London Terminals for 2FOR1 London attractions, or the train station nearest to the attraction itself. Tickets that have a destination too far from the attractions location may be denied by attraction staff. "

So for example a ticket from Queenstown Road to Vauxhall could easily be refused at the Tower of London because the journey ends a long way away from the attraction. You need a return ticket to London Terminals at the very least to comply.

This clause was especially added within the last few months because of the growth of people using these type of tickets quite possibly because of this 'trick' being widely disseminated via TripAdvisor.

Fortunately by coming here you get up to date advice.

Marco, thank you! I keep coming to this forum because I can count on getting helpful advice. New plan. Think I will buy return tickets from Oxford to London for the 25th and 30th. If it works for even one 2-4-1 offer it will be worth it. If it doesn't, it didn't cost much to try.

I have suggested people to get a return ticket in the past when they are going to be making a one way journey for this purpose. You do need to remember to keep and present both tickets though. You and your friends would just need to get an advance from Oxford to London Terminals dated 25 April if this is the first day you may want to use them, to pair up with your Advances from London to oxford. I'd suggest buying online now and getting your friend simply to collect them, but she would need the card they have been bought with to do this (so probably best her card).

Marco, you've been very helpful! One last question please. I've had difficulty navigating the nationalrail.co.uk site. I've had better luck on www.thetrainline.com, and I can pay with paypal and have the tickets mailed internationally. But I want to be certain this is a legitimate National Rail site where I will get the tickets I need for the 2-4-1 and not a consolidator who will send me some kind of voucher ticket. Many thanks for your help!

Trainline.com is a perfectly respectable third party seller of tickets and has been around a long time. It isn't the cheapest as it tends to add fees on, and I have no experience of its reliability of international ticket dispatch.

The National Rail website will direct you to the website of the train operator for purchase, which you can go to directly instead.

"I've had difficulty navigating the nationalrail.co.uk site."

If you tell us what type of navigational problems you're having, we can help.

Thanks, everybody, for taking the time to answer my questions. Tickets bought online and in the mail to my friend who lives in London. I didn't think the National Rail website was going to work because only UK billing addresses can be used when you enter your credit card information. So I tried using my friend's billing address, and the charge went through on my AMEX. I did buy RT tickets from Oxford to London, starting the day we arrive, so hopefully we can now take advantage of some of the great 2-4-1 offers. I really appreciate all the help I've gotten on this site!

I apologize for asking a question on an old thread, but Marco's replies have confused me a bit. I was planning on buying two weekly travelcard passes from a national rail station for 33 pounds each and then taking advantage of the 2-4-1 deals where I can as well as using it for buses, the tube, etc. I'm not from an area with public transportation so these questions are going to be dumb, here it goes: I can't use the tube to get to my destination and then get the 2-4-1 deal? I figured you just had to use your travelcard to your destination and if the travelcard covers the tube, that would work. But I guess London Terminals is different from the tube and I have to use the terminals? If my hotel is near the London Eye and I use my paper travelcard to get to the Tower of London, how would I do that in order to take advantage of the 2-4-1 deal? Will I have to travel by train each time I want to use the 2-4-1 deals, like if I want to get a deal for the Globe or Saint Pauls on the same day that I travel by train to see the Tower of London?

Don't worry. A 7-day paper travelcard issued by a National Rail station is good for the offer during its period of validity even if you never happen to travel on a NR train at all.

You buy a 7-day travelcard at a National Rail train station on National Rail ticket stock. That travelcard covers your tube & bus travel for a week but because you buy it at a National Rail station it somehow counts as a train ticket for the purpose of two-for-one deals. So if two people both have the travelcards, and you print out two-for-one vouchers, you get the discounted admission. Because it's assumed you will have used that travelcard to get to the site. You never need to get on an actual train at the station where you buy it.

It's one of London's best deals - a week of public transport plus 2-for-1 entry at many big sites.

The Train Operating Companies fund the 2 for 1 offers, so a travelcard on National Rail stock paper qualifies, they don't need to know that you've actually used the travelcard.

I understand the confusion about buying rail tickets to activate the two for one offers. My husband & I just returned from a trip to England. I realized after reading this great forum with wonderful advice it was best for us to buy a 7 day Travel Card for each of us to utilize the 2 for 1 offers. The husband was convinced Oyster was the way to go but when I explained with the 7 day Travel Cards we also paid for only one person but two gained entry he was totally on board! We were in London for at least 7 days at one point and advice I read stated the 7 day Travel Card is better if you are in London for 4 or more days. We just needed to get the Travel Cards which we did at Paddington as our Airbnb was very close by. Be sure when at a rail station to ask for help in locating the Two for One brochures as that's where you find the vouchers in the back you must complete before presenting to the attraction's ticket office. We got several to have enough. What a wonderful value!

I also purchased a Two Together National Railcard upon arrival from Heathrow for our previously purchased rail tickets for travel to other parts of England. Those rail tickets were received well in advance of travel via email and pdf with barcodes. It took me awhile to realize I could purchase rail tickets way in advance to save and state I had a railcard, but wait and purchase that railcard upon our arrival. I just needed to have the railcard in hand once on the train. (That solved the problem of no UK address, which is required for delivery of the railcard other than getting it in person upon arrival.) I also printed the tickets/barcodes out --but at times just showed my phone. I was very organized but on that one left our two properly sized photos at home. So we paid the money at the photo booths at Paddington getting lots more photos than we needed (although we needed two sets for Travel Cards and for the Two for One Cards.... and we looked like two criminals in mug shots after flying overnight. I can look at them and laugh now.

Purchasing rail tickets way in advance saves money but the downside is that circumstances can cause one to eat the cost of that ticket if the train is not taken. Well we had prepaid advance rail tickets to travel from Paddington to Bristol on the day of arrival. I added in much additional time to make that train after landing at 6:30 am at Heathrow. We were through all Passport Control etc in record time, and we only had carry on bags. So we ate the cost of changing our train to leave earlier so we could sit down, take a load off and just relax and enjoy the train ride. It was a change we made based upon what we needed at that moment and neither of us regret it. However that was the only time we ate the expense, and we had multiple train trips in four countries and saved a lot by booking in advance.