Trainline Review: The Booking Fee, the Refund Ladder and Who Pays When You Are Late

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Trainline charges between 59p and £2.79 to book a British train ticket, and nothing at all if you book in its app on the day you travel. In the year to 28 February 2026 it put £6,319m of tickets through the platform and kept £453m of that as revenue. Both sets of figures are Trainline's own — the fee from its help centre, the money from its results — and were checked on 20 September 2026.

What the fee buys is reach. Trainline's about page describes bringing "the majority of rail and coach operators" in Europe onto one platform, across more than 40 countries, for 27 million active customers of whom 18 million are British. It holds 2.7 million digital railcards, 16% more than a year earlier, and 45% of the digital railcard market among 16 to 30 year olds. Its SplitSave tool, which quietly breaks one journey into several cheaper tickets, saved an average of £13 a trip on bookings between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025 by the company's own measurement.

One thing is worth knowing before you book, because it decides who you deal with when a train does not run. Trainline is a retailer, not a railway. The fares belong to the train companies, and so do the tickets, the seat reservations and the compensation. If your train is an hour late the claim goes to the operator that ran it — Trainline will spot the delay and send you a link, but somebody else signs the cheque.

Two numbers for the same question

Trainline's own about page gives two counts of the same thing on the same screen. It says the company aggregates data from "over 70 carriers across Europe", and a few lines away it says it works with "270+ rail and coach companies". Both cannot be a count of the same set. The likeliest reading is that the smaller number counts carriers wired directly into the booking engine and the larger one counts every company whose tickets can appear in a search, but Trainline does not say so, and it is the sort of figure worth asking about rather than assuming.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the business. Net ticket sales split three ways in the year to 28 February 2026: £4,135m from UK consumers, up 6%; £1,104m from international consumers, up 5%; and £1,081m from Trainline Solutions, the business travel and white-label arm, up 15%. The fastest-growing third of the company is therefore the part most travellers never see.

The fee, to the penny

The booking fee "will vary between a minimum of 59p and a maximum of £2.79", and Trainline says it is calculated from the booking itself — the ticket price and the date of travel. It is shown in the basket before payment, which is a change the regulator pushed for rather than a courtesy. The app is treated differently: book in it on the day you are travelling and there is no booking fee, and the app charges no delivery fee on any ticket at any time.

On the website, delivery is free for digital tickets, £2.99 to collect from a station machine and £12.99 for a paper ticket by Royal Mail Special Delivery. That last figure is worth pausing on — it is more than many advance fares cost, and it exists because Special Delivery is a tracked, insured service rather than a stamp.

The comparison a reader will want is with buying the identical ticket somewhere else. Rail fares are set by the industry, not the retailer, so the ticket is the same ticket and the price of the travel is the same price. LNER's own site tells customers they can "[b]ook train tickets anywhere in England, Scotland and Wales through LNER and pay no bookings fees". On a £60 journey a fee of up to £2.79 is noise. On a £9 advance single it is nearer a third of the saving that made the advance worth booking.

How the money actually reaches Trainline

Put the two headline numbers side by side and the business model falls out of them. £6,319m of tickets sold produced £453m of revenue, which is a little over seven pence in every pound. Most of that is commission paid by the train and coach companies for selling their seats; the booking fee is the part the passenger sees. Trainline's terms put it plainly enough: "some of the fees come straight from the operators, so we have to charge them to you."

It is a profitable arrangement. Operating profit reached £122m in the year to 28 February 2026, up 43%, on adjusted EBITDA of £177m, up 11%, with basic earnings per share of 19.4p and £66m of adjusted free cash flow. The company has bought back £294m of its own shares since starting in September 2023, about 23% of its issued share capital, and had completed £94m of the current £150m programme by 30 April 2026. A retailer buying in a quarter of itself is a retailer with more cash than it has uses for.

Changing your mind costs money twice

Trainline runs two separate fee ladders, and they are its charges, levied on top of whatever the train company itself deducts. Refunding a UK ticket is free below £2, then £1 on a ticket costing £2 to £2.99, £1.50 from £3, £2 from £4, £3 from £5, £4 from £6 and £5 on anything from £7 upwards. Exchanging is dearer: free below £2, then £1 up to £4, £2.50 up to £6, £3 up to £8, £5 up to £11, £7.50 up to £13, £8.50 up to £15 and £10 above that. A Season Ticket refund costs a flat £10, though changing an eligible one is free.

Two details sit underneath the ladders. The booking fee itself is never returned — "booking fees cannot be refunded" — so a cancelled £8 ticket can lose its £5 refund fee and its booking fee together. And on European journeys the exchange fee is not Trainline's to set at all: it "vary[s] by carrier" and only appears during booking.

What changed on 1 April 2026

The biggest shift in years landed this April and it has nothing to do with Trainline's own charges. For Anytime tickets, Off-Peak tickets, Day Travelcards, Rovers and Rangers bought on or after 1 April 2026, a refund must be requested "before 23:59 on the day before your ticket becomes valid". Ask afterwards and it is "only considered in exceptional circumstances", with evidence that the ticket went unused. Tickets bought before that date keep the terms they were sold under, however far ahead the journey.

The industry administration fee sits on top: up to £5 a ticket and up to £10 a Season Ticket, and where the fee would swallow the refund, nothing is paid at all. Three things survive untouched, and they are the ones most often forgotten — a cancelled train still means a full refund, Delay Repay is a separate scheme that these rules do not reach, and the outward half of an Open Return cannot be refunded on its own once it becomes valid.

Delay Repay is the train company's job

Compensation thresholds are set by each operator and most follow the same shape: 25% of the fare for a delay of 15 to 29 minutes, 50% from 30 to 59 minutes, and the full fare at 60 minutes and beyond. Some operators pay nothing below 30 minutes. Trainline's part is to watch the journey and tell you: "We'll track your journey and let you know if you're eligible... we'll send you a push notification or email with a link to the train operator's website, where you can submit your claim."

That handover is not a design choice. In its own full-year statement Trainline told investors that operators are offering "1-click delay-repay, a feature third party retailers are expressly prohibited from providing to their customers". A company flagging its own competitive disadvantage in an investor document is as close to an unvarnished fact as this market produces, and it is the single clearest reason a frequent claimant might book on the operator's own app instead.

The regulator has already done the arithmetic on refund fees

The Office of Rail and Road studied refund administration across a full year to 31 March 2020: 341 million tickets issued and 5.8 million refunded. It found the average fee charged, where one was charged at all, was £6.96 a ticket, against an average cost of processing a refund — staff, systems, bank charges — of £3.77. Because 28% of fees were waived, the average across every refunded ticket came out at £4.64. The industry cap is £10, and the ORR has been working with the Department for Transport and the Rail Delivery Group on whether that cap should come down.

Read Trainline's £10 Season Ticket refund fee against those numbers and it sits precisely at the ceiling, at something under three times the regulator's estimate of what the work costs. That is legal, it is what the rules allow, and it is also the kind of figure a passenger only discovers at the moment they need the money back.

Who you are buying from, and who is watching

The contracting party for a British booking is Trainline.com Limited, company number 03846791, incorporated on 17 September 1999 and registered at 1 Stonecutter Street, London EC4A 4AH under SIC code 62090. Its last accounts were made up to 28 February 2025 and its next confirmation statement is due on 23 January 2027. A booking made in France is with Trainline SAS instead, trade register 512 277 450 in Paris, under French law and with a French tourism mediator rather than an ombudsman.

British customers get the Rail Ombudsman, named in Trainline's own terms. Give Trainline 40 working days to resolve a complaint — or less, if it sends a deadlock letter — and the Ombudsman can then take the case and issue a decision binding on Trainline, free to the passenger except for incidental costs. The ORR polices the selling itself. It reviewed 40 online rail ticket retailers in December 2023 and wrote to seven about how clearly they displayed booking, finder's, fulfilment and refund fees; Trainline was one of the seven. By March 2025 the regulator recorded that all of them had made changes, and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has since required fees to be folded into the total price at the earliest opportunity.

A state-owned rival is being built, and Trainline told its shareholders so

The government announced in January 2025 that Great British Railways would sell tickets, and the Railways Bill sets out how. Fourteen separate operator websites are to be folded into a single GBR app and site, alongside ticket offices, machines and onboard sales. Independent retailers are promised continued access — "[i]ndependent retailers, open access operators and devolved operators... will also be able to retail to passengers, just as they do today" — and a code of practice, owned and administered by the ORR, is meant to keep the state's retail arm at arm's length from the state's wholesale arm. Breaching that code will be a licence breach.

The detail that matters most to a retailer is quieter. The retail industry management functions the Rail Delivery Group performs today — setting commission rates, running technical standards, licensing retailers — move into a GBR back office. The body setting Trainline's commission will be part of the group competing with it. Trainline's own full-year statement records the company working on "development of the Code of Practice for GBR" and engaging with government on the Bill. None of this changes what a ticket costs this month, and all of it explains why the company is arguing publicly about fair retail market practices.

Where the savings are real

Two Trainline features genuinely move money, and both are worth naming precisely. SplitSave finds legal split tickets for a journey — you stay on the same train, it simply has to stop at each split point — and Trainline puts the average saving at £13 a trip for bookings between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, measured against the next cheapest fare a Trainline customer could have bought. It is the company's own measurement against its own baseline, so treat it as a fair indication rather than an audited number, but split ticketing is real and most travellers never do it by hand.

The second is railcards. Trainline sells 2.7 million digital railcards, up 16% year on year, and holds 45% of the 16 to 30 market — a £30 card that takes a third off most fares pays for itself in two or three journeys, and the digital version cannot be left at home. Neither feature is exclusive to Trainline, but both are easier to find there than on most operator sites.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 20 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.