Online Rail Ninja Advertisements Are Proliferating

Oh no! I have not had the ads come up either on FB or Youtube but I'll bet I have them now, hahaha!

There are so many dismal stories, particularly on Trip Advisor Train Travel forum regarding this online travel agent. I just popped over there and sure enough...the main Rail Ninja complaint thread is still on page one. It was started in 2017 and now runs to 77 pages with 768 replies.

We've also had a number of Rail Ninja threads on this forum but none that run into the length of the TA one, thankfully. Hopefully people here ask before they book.

I agree. I've seen them floating around for the past year. I usually just tell people to always book direct. Not all of the booking agents are spammy like Rail Ninja but honestly I think direct booking is always the best way to go.

Pam, that's a very long thread! Maybe we should start linking to that every time there's a question about it. 😊

I was curious about the reviews so I opened an incognito window and went to Google to check out the reviews. It was interesting because there were quite a few good reviews on there. However I noticed that all the good reviews were written by people with only 1 or 2 other reviews, which makes me think that they're not real customers or they were offered some incentive to leave a good review. The bad reviews were written by reviewers who have dozens if not hundreds of reviews and those are the ones I pay more attention to.

I’ve had good experiences with Trainline — their fees are modest and they were especially good in getting us good “ticket splitting” deals in the UK with its extraordinarily complex rail system full of pitfalls for the unwary. I know that can be done more directly thanks to the expertise on this forum, but it’s daunting to those lacking that so Trainline’s fee was money well spent. But I think they’re the exception to the rule and generally I do avoid third party sites.

Rail Nija might be good for the UK, but they are not good for Germany. If you are looking for a train in Germany, use the Bahn website, not Rail Nija.

I looked up a train for a certain time and date from Frankfurt Hbf to Munich Hbf on both Rail Nija and the Bahn. Rail Nija had the wrong wrong train number, and the wrong time by 3 minutes, and their ticket price was about $50 ($123 vs $173) more than the Bahn's price. And they didn't say what the shipping price was, and they wouldn't tell me unless I gave them my email address, and I wasn't going to do that without knowing the price, so they're probably even more overpriced.

They say they are the most convenient way to buy a ticket

@Slate, I’ve used Trainline a time or two when I couldn’t get the SNCF website or app to work and I used to use it when it was Capitaine Train. To me it’s a different kettle of fish from Rail Ninja.

Trainline (and Rail Europe) are an entirely different game than Rail Ninja. We can quibble about wether it is useful, but Trainline is not dishonest.

Rail Ninja is.

Rail Ninja also is not an official reseller of train tickets. Trainline and Rail Europe have agreements with the companies on whose behalf they sell tickets. That also gives them access in to the booking system, so they can eg. tell you how many tickets at a certain price level there are still left. And yes they do charge a booking fee, but it is all transparrent.

Rail Ninja does not have a connection with the booking system. They just take your money, and then themselves go to the railways' website and book a ticket. They first mark it up though. They also will take your money for bookings for trains that are not even bookable yet.

Regarding the reviews: When you book with Rail Ninja you get a nice polite request to leave them a review. So most of these reviews will be by people who have just bought a ticket and have not yet travelled...

Note that there are a few changes afoot regarding train ticketing. The EU wants the companies to protect passengers' rights better, and importantly inform them begger. I recently travelled from Amsterdam to a place in Belgium and had bought my ticket from NSInternational (as one should) and the ticket came with a few paragraphs outlining my rights, and what to do if I was delayed or missed a connection. Good on you NS!

I think trainline is good for trips in France and Spain and Italy even (and between those countries). Use Bahn.de for central Europe. The German Railways are continuously expanding the territory their booking system covers, so you can now do things like book from Berlin all the way to Palermo on them...

Rail Europe is a good place to get Interrail/Eurail reservations for Spain, France and Italy, but in Italy you can also still just go to the train station and get it there.

I would suggest for booking tickets in the UK, people not use Trainline. It actually costs the UK taxpayer money every time you use it, because they take a commission out of the fare which means less money for the railway. They've also admitted they don't always prioritise the cheapest tickets or show all options available (since they get a 5% commission on each ticket, it's in their interest to push you towards higher fares). If you want to book tickets here, go to nationalrail.co.uk, put in your journey, it will provide your options and from there it will link you to the actual operator and you can buy directly. You can also buy tickets on any route from any of the operators (I know some people here like LNER or ScotRail) but for me I find it easiest to just buy with the operator who's operating the route. Of course Trainline manages the retail platforms for some of the operators as well but you can't really avoid that.

From sometime next year (possibly spring) there will be a new app you can buy all tickets from directly once Great British Railways is fully established.

And, in the UK, another (brand new) problem with Trainline. For people who use physical tickets they have started to charge £2.99 to pick up pre-ordered tickets from a station machine.
There is no other word for that than a rip off- that service is free if you buy direct through any train company, or AFAIK any other third party, apart from trainline.

Wow, I didn't know about the charge for paper tickets! There really is absolutely no reason to charge extra for that, a complete rip-off.

I’m not following why using Trainline would cost UK taxpayers money because the train operator makes less money, when the train operator is a private company in the UK. Perhaps that if the train company makes less, it pays less tax? But Trainline presumably also pays taxes on the money it makes in the UK. If Trainline has an incentive to push users to higher priced trips, well, the train operators have exactly the same incentive, as every travel company does. It pays to check options. For our trip earlier this year from Llandudno to London, Trainline offered a significantly lower price for the same trains than did the operators’ sites, at the same time of ticketing.

Trainline makes money for the UK which is why the UK pays the commission. What would be wonderful would be when buying train tickets becomes as easy as buying a plane ticket.

The way railway ticket money is distributed means that a % of the ticket cost goes to the ticket seller. Flexible tickets are higher priced than Advance ones partly because a % goes to each possible train operator you could use it on.

Buy a London to Edinburgh flexible ticket- the money is distributed by a complex formula between LNER, Avanti West Coast, Northern, Trans Pennine, LNWR, Scotrail, East Midlands Trains, Lumo, Caledonian Sleeper and others (even London Overground) as you might travel part of the journey on any of their trains. The formula knows what is the chance you will travel on each of the trains and gives the relevant %.
So it might give say 50% to LNER, 30% to Avanti, 5% to Lumo, 4% to Northern, whatever. The actual splits don't matter.
Buy an Advance Ticket on an LNER train and it almost all goes to LNER- all if you buy from LNER, a bit less if you buy from elsewhere.

But a small % (let's call it commission) goes to the seller. So if I buy that ticket at a Northern Ticket Office a bit of money goes to Northern. Likewise any other rail company on line.
In essence that money remains somewhere within the rail industry. Whether each rail company is privatised or nationally owned they are all subsidised by the UK tax payer. So that % basically offsets the level of subsidy needed.
When Trainline (or any other 3rd party, let's not single out one company here) sell the ticket they keep that "commission" and keep that as profit for a private company. That money leaves the railway industry, so it basically costs the UK taxpayer. On each ticket the effect is tiny, but cumulatively it is huge.

The benefit to Scotrail of selling split tickets is that they get commission money for journeys you couldn't possibly make on their trains which they wouldn't normally qualify for.

I personally buy almost all tickets from Northern as their website and machines are excellent. But they are my local company so they also get that commission. Yes it's a wee bit of favouritism. But buy a London to Bath ticket from LNER- they get the commission, revenue they wouldn't get normally as you can't sensibly use an LNER train to go from London to Bath. If I buy a £50 London to Bath ticket from Northern they get lets say 50p commission for it (the actual figure is irrelevant).

At the end of the day I'm not that fussed on who gets the odd £1 or two, as long as it stays within the rail industry, but I am fussed at the extraction model. And that is why there are so many third party ticketing sites.

If, in America, you could buy through tickets between all rail operators, Amtrak fares would be a bit higher, as everyone would get their little share. What you can do in the UK is, for example, buy the equivalent of a through fare from a CalTrain station (let's say SFO Airport) to Chicago Airport (either the airport station on the L line or O'Hare Transfer on the Metra) using Amtrak between them.

If you could buy that whole ticket from CalTrain or Metra they would get a commission of the entire ticket price, taking revenue from Amtrak.

Interesting, appreciate the info. It looks like one criticism of the third party sellers like Trainline is that they are charging us more for a ticket than we might pay on the operator’s site because they charge the buyer a commission, but another criticism is that they are also taking a commission from the operator. Certainly both things can be true at the same time. And generally, that because there is government subsidy of train operations, the more the train operator makes the less that subsidy may need to be. No doubt true as well, but by that logic, an even better way to support the railroads and the taxpayer would be to pay the walk up first class fare for any trip. My altruism doesn’t extend quite that far.