Strike action travel information

• Avanti West Coast tickets dated 19 January can be used any time from Saturday 18 January up until Tuesday 21 January.
• Avanti West Coast tickets dated 26 January can be used any time from Saturday 25 January up until Tuesday 28 January.

You don’t need to make any changes to your ticket in order to travel flexibly – our onboard and station teams will be ready to accept your tickets as outlined above.

We’ll provide more information on your ticket options for the upcoming strikes from Sunday 2 February as soon as possible.

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Ticket flexibility for the strikes on 31 December, 2 January and 12 January has now ended. If you didn’t use your ticket, you can claim a refund up to 28 days after the travel date (see below for further details).

Customers who booked tickets to travel on strike days before the industrial action was announced on 17 December can claim a full, fee-free refund from their point of purchase.

If you bought your ticket from the Avanti West Coast website or app, simply fill in this form within 28 days of your scheduled journey date, being sure to include your booking reference and/or a copy of your ticket. You’ll get a full refund with no admin fee.

If you bought your ticket from another retailer’s website or app, such as Trainline, please visit their website to request your refund.

If you bought your ticket from a station, head back there with your ticket for a full refund with no admin fee.

If you booked with us, we’ll always contact you by email if your journey’s affected by strike action. We always recommend checking your journey before you travel on our Live Train Status page, but we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible if your booking’s expected to be affected by the upcoming strike dates.

If you booked before 17 December (when the strikes were announced), your reservation is no longer valid due to the timetable being significantly reduced.

You can claim a full refund if you no longer wish to travel in view of your reservation being cancelled. Alternatively, you can make use of our ticket flexibility options.

If you still need to travel during strike action, we have unreserved carriages on all our trains and we increase this capacity on strike days to help everyone get a seat. No need to change your ticket: just ask our station team where’s unreserved and take any available seat.

We can only book new seat reservations once the strike timetables are confirmed (see expected dates above). Just get in touch here and we’ll see what’s available for you. Bookings made after timetables are confirmed and tickets rereleased are valid.

There won't be replacement buses due to strike action, but you can use this online bus journey planner to explore your local alternative transport options.

We have some replacement buses on our routes due to planned engineering work – find out more on our engineering page.

To minimise the number of people disrupted when timetables are due to change significantly, we suspend ticket sales for strike days as soon as they're announced. 

We expect online journey planners to correctly show our amended strike timetable and our tickets to go back on sale by the Monday before the Sunday strike action.

If you still wish to buy a ticket for a strike date before future amended timetables are confirmed, you can do this at any National Rail station. You’ll be offered a flexible Anytime or Off-Peak ticket without a reservation or an itinerary, due to the timetables not yet being confirmed.

To avoid disappointment, we recommend waiting until the timetables are confirmed, journey planners are updated, and all tickets are back on sale.

Normal refund conditions apply for Season ticket holders, including Flexi Season tickets, if you no longer wish to use your ticket. You can request a refund from where you bought it.

If you do travel using your Season ticket and the strike action means your journey with Avanti West Coast is delayed by 15 minutes or more, you can claim Delay Repay compensation within 28 days of the journey, here.

If the Season ticket you hold is monthly or longer, or if you have an activated days’ worth of travel on a Flexi Season ticket, you will be able to claim 100% Delay Repay compensation for strike days or days with timetable disruption.

If one leg of your planned return journey is scheduled to be on a strike date, you’re able to take advantage of our ticket flexibility and refund options for both legs. That’s whether your ticket is a Return and either portion is affected, or if you’ve booked two Single tickets to make up a return journey.

Customers with tickets with either leg or portion booked on a strike date can travel on alternative dates or claim a full refund from their point of purchase. Find out more, here.