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Virgin Trains to invest £50m into West Coast services

Virgin Trains is to spend £50m on improvements for its West Coast services, including station upgrades and new on-board facilities.

The investment includes £20m for station refurbishment, such as improved waiting rooms, extra ticket machines and more passenger help points. The website will be upgraded, £3m will be spent on new on-board catering equipment, 21 trains are each having one first class carriage converted to standard to provide 5,500 more standard class seats a day and the on-board wi-fi is to be improved.

The improvements are all part of Virgin Trains’ focus on “customer experience”. The operator conducted extensive customer research to find its passengers’ top priorities for an “ideal customer experience” from booking the journey, to on-board experience right through to arrival.

At the top of the responses was a reward for loyalty, with 84% of respondents saying they would like some form of reward scheme. Also at the top was more pre-boarding help at 72% and better facilities at stations at 62%.

Speaking at the announcement event held at London Euston station, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson said: “We don’t just want to meet customer expectations, we want to exceed them, and that’s why we’re committing to go further than any other train operator, to create an unparalleled on-board experience for our customers. Our customers told us what would make their journeys with us even better and we listened.

“We have even more ambitious plans to delight every customer who travels with us, whether that’s through being able to offer thousands of extra seats or new services to Blackpool and Shrewsbury. It’s our people who will help make this happen, as we aim to make every journey on a Virgin train as close to perfect as we possibly can.”

Virgin Trains is also attempting to empower all its 3,287 staff to make a ‘positive difference to every journey’, whether that’s helping those in need of extra assistance through the Priority Boarding service, or simply surprising and delighting a customer to make their day.

The company has also launching a new marketing campaign, focused on encouraging modal shift to rail by stressing the ‘unique customer experience’.

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