Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 20th of June.

And with my delightful colleagues on the independent travel desk, we thought it would be fun

to talk to you today and tomorrow about how we buy tickets, specifically train tickets today,

plane tickets tomorrow. I'm delighted to be joined by Annabel Grossman, who's the

Global Travel Editor, and Ben Parker, who is the Deputy Travel Editor, and you would have read

their excellent words, I certainly have. But we've, until now, never had a proper good old

argument about buying railway tickets, even though we are very frequent

travellers by rail. So let's start with you, Annabel. You need to travel tomorrow from London

to Edinburgh. How are you going to book that? Okay, so I'm afraid I'm actually very boring and

not very savvy when it comes to buying train tickets. What I will do,

it was I'll quite simply go onto the train line, find the most convenient train and buy it straight off that.

And I know that's not very clever and I know I'm paying a premium, but to be honest, considering how much hassle it is to check each individual rail line,

I would rather just go on the train line and just pay once.

Of course, train line is a very profitable private company which has got brilliant tech.

It charges a fee on many bookings. and obviously you're happy with that for the reasons

you explain. Well, I'm not, no, I'm not happy with it at all, and I would much rather not.

And I especially know that the Simon Calder advice is not to use, or not to use the train line,

but be very aware that you are paying extra if you do

use the train line. But I just genuinely cannot deal with the hassle of checking to find a

cheaper price. So to be honest, just to save the stress, I will just go to the same app again and

again.

LNER, LUMO, the two main operators between London and Edinburgh,

...