LOYALTY club passengers travelling on the new East Coast franchise will have to spend ten times as much to earn enough points for a free train ticket, it has emerged.
Campaigners have branded the return "an insult" after the new franchise holder, Intercity Rail (ICR), a Stagecoach-Virgin consortium, emailed final the details of its Nectar point scheme to East Coast customers this week.
The Nectar scheme will replace the popular East Coast Rewards loyalty club from Sunday as the publicly-owned franchise is handed back to the private sector.
Existing Rewards members will be able to convert their current tally into Nectar points at a rate of six Nectar points for every one Rewards point. There will also be an introductory rate which will see 500 Nectar points worth £3.75 on the Virgin East Coast website until May 31, falling to £2.50 thereafter.
Calculations by campaign group, Save East Coast Rewards, calculate that this means passengers will have to spend £2,500 to earn enough Nectar points to 'buy' a £25 standard single - compared to £255 currently under East Coast Rewards.
A first class single will require a £5000 spend compared to as little as £307 currently.
Dan Hopkins, who founded Save EC Rewards in January, said it was "a bit of an insult" for ICR to claim any passengers would be better off.
He added: "Those who've been following our campaign won't be surprised at how poor value Nectar points are but it appears to have been a shock to many others when they read the email from East Coast.
"Every time East Coast sends out emails about the switch to Nectar we see an increase in followers to our Twitter account. This time we added 300 new followers in the 12 hours after the email was sent out."
Rewards user, David Hallowell, added: "My total spend is quite high, but nowhere near excessive, over £3000 on an average year. The free tickets are a great reward for using their services. I don't think the same thing about Nectar, the same spend would only get £30 of rewards."
ICR said market research of 2000 East Coast passengers found that Nectar was "by far the most popular loyalty scheme" among those surveyed. Critics say ICR should have questioned Rewards members specifically, rather than a random sample of East Coast passengers.
A spokeswoman for the Stagecoach-Virgin consortium said: "We have now made a commitment to introduce Nectar on March 1 and we'll also offer the choice of collecting points on Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club.
"The change benefits millions of customers every year who will now be able to enjoy the bonus of Nectar or Flying Club points when buying tickets for travel with Virgin Trains East Coast."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article