I spend a fair bit of time travelling between Bristol and London on Great Western Railway, so I’ve become quite familiar with the 8.30 departure from Bristol Temple Meads. It’s usually a pleasant train to catch. The morning rush has passed, it’s officially off-peak, and I can almost always secure my favourite uncomfortable seat: window, table, facing forwards. Yes, I know, I probably need to get out more.
This week, however, things were very different. The train was absolutely packed. Every seat was occupied, people were standing in the aisles, and there was barely room to move. It wasn’t a Friday afternoon, there wasn’t a major sporting event, and there didn’t appear to be any obvious reason why this particular service should be so busy.
As it turns out, there was.
GWR has introduced a summer promotion, reducing advance fares on certain services to just £25 each way. That’s around half the price I’d normally expect to pay. On the face of it, it seems like a sensible initiative. A family considering a day trip to London suddenly finds it much more affordable, and perhaps people who would normally think twice about travelling decide to go after all. But as I sat there, squeezed between fellow passengers, I started thinking about pricing strategy.
The obvious reaction is to question whether the tickets were simply too cheap. If demand was strong enough to fill every seat, could GWR have charged another £5 per ticket? Almost certainly. Across a full train, that could represent several thousand pounds of additional revenue from a single journey. It’s the sort of calculation revenue managers make every day.
However, that’s only true if your objective was to maximise revenue from that train. What if that wasn’t the objective at all?
Perhaps the purpose of the promotion was to win market share. There wasn’t actually much evidence that the train was full of families heading off on summer adventures. In fact, most passengers looked like commuters or leisure travellers travelling alone. It made me wonder whether GWR had temporarily persuaded people away from National Express, FlixBus, or even their cars. If someone enjoys the experience and decides to travel by rail again in the future, the promotion may have achieved something far more valuable than simply filling one train.
That’s the danger of judging pricing decisions without understanding the strategy behind them. From the outside, it’s easy to assume someone has undervalued their product. In reality, they may be investing in future customer behaviour rather than today’s revenue.
Exactly the same principle applies to conferences and events. One of the most common conversations I have with clients is about ticket pricing. Should we run an early bird? Should we offer a discount? Should members receive preferential pricing? Should we reduce rates to encourage attendance? The honest answer is that none of those questions can be answered until you’ve agreed what you’re actually trying to achieve.
If your conference already sells out every year, reducing prices probably makes little commercial sense. You’re simply giving away income from people who were already prepared to attend. On the other hand, if you’re launching a new event, entering a new market, trying to attract younger professionals, increasing diversity, or encouraging first-time delegates, then a pricing promotion could be one of the smartest investments you make.
Too often, organisers think of pricing purely as a financial exercise. It isn’t. Pricing is one of the most powerful behavioural tools available. It influences who attends, when they book, how they perceive value, and even whether they consider your event in the first place.
The lesson I took from a crowded train wasn’t that GWR had got its pricing right or wrong. I simply don’t know enough about what they were trying to achieve to make that judgement. The real lesson is that before we debate whether a ticket is too expensive or too cheap, we should first ask a much more important question: What behaviour are we trying to change? Once you know the answer to that, pricing becomes much easier.