IRISH RAIL HAD to shut a loophole where pensioners and other free travel pass holders were reserving seats on multiple trains each day to give themselves flexibility over what service to actually take.

The board of the rail operator was told that some customers were booking “numerous seats for several trains”, which was causing difficulties as some services appeared fully booked even when they were not.

A note said these passengers were doing this to “provide themselves options at no cost” and that the sharp practice needed to be curtailed by reducing the number of seats that were available for reservation on each service.

An internal briefing paper said that during the Covid-19 pandemic, mandatory reservations had been introduced so that Irish Rail could limit the number of passengers on board each train to allow for social distancing.

This had meant that passengers who were not making their bookings online could reserve themselves a “space” on a train at no cost.

The proposal said: “This leads to the possibility of the free seat functionality being abused as customers may be inclined to book capacity they don’t need to ensure travel.”

The paper, prepared by Irish Rail’s head of revenue management, said that on some services up to 40% of seats on a train were being reserved at no cost to the passenger.

It gave an example of one train last November with a capacity of 290 passengers, where already 138 seats had been booked without the person paying anything – and some of them were likely to be phantom reservations.

However, Irish Rail were worried that if they went straight back to pre-Covid rules, there was a risk of adverse “customer feedback and resistance” and that the situation needed to be delicately handled.

The proposal said one possibility would be to offer up to 20% of seats at a reservation cost of €0, but that once this limit was hit, it would be charged at full price or €2.50 across all ticket types.

The loophole of unpaid reservations had been raised with the National Transport Authority and later with the board of Irish Rail at their meeting in February of this year.

The meeting was told unused bookings were “directly impacting on customer experience” but that 25% of seats would continue to be allocated as unreserved on each train.

“The current arrangements reinstate [what was] in place before Covid restrictions,” said the minutes of the board meeting.

An Irish Rail spokesman said: “During Covid-19, we waived the reservation fee for holders of existing tickets, to support the requirement at that time to pre-book Intercity tickets.

“Rather than revert to a fee for all reservations, we have maintained an allocation of free reservations for existing ticket holders (including those travelling with existing open return, [free travel cards], family or season tickets), and then when this allocation is fully booked, all remaining seats can be reserved by existing ticket holders for €2.50 per journey.”

He said reservations were not compulsory for those travelling with open return, free travel cards, family or season tickets, but that the option was there for people who wished to make them.