News
Emily Shackleton
Apr 14, 2015
Angry commuters may have likened their journeys on delayed and diverted Southeastern trains this week to participating in the Hunger Games, but it is not the worst train provider in the public's eyes.
i100.co.uk looked at the number of complaints to train companies collected by the Office of Rail and Road, and Southeastern fares well against the others across the country.
Southeastern’s average number of complaints per 100,000 passenger journeys since 2007 is the fourth lowest out of 19 total train providers at 17.
Virgin Trains on the other hand has received 19 times more than Southeastern over the seven-year period at 316.
Complaints about Virgin's services by financial quarter have continued to rise over the past year. Since the beginning of 2014, there has been a 31 per cent increase in complaints with a spike in the January to March period.
Virgin Trains attracted criticism on Twitter recently when its planned engineering works on the Easter bank holiday weekend meant it had to cancel advance cheap fares, forcing passengers to buy more expensive off-peak tickets.
A spokesperson for Virgin Trains would not go into detail about the rise in complaints in the last year, but said that Virgin Trains “try to encourage people to feed back about our services and make it easier to do so than any other train company”.
They referred to a recent survey by Passenger Focus that marked passenger satisfaction with Virgin Train journeys at 90 per cent.
“We are consistently at or near the top of the long distance operators," they added. "We have also seen a significant rise in letters of praise for the business and our people in the last year."
More: [The most delayed trains in Britain]3
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