£4 tickets from UK cities to Cornwall on offer – but you’ll need to act fast

FlixBus is launching services from Newquay, Truro and Penzance and as part of the launch is offering tickets to London for just £4

FlixBus is linking up major UK cities with a beautiful stretch of coastline.

The German coach company is rolling into Cornwall this week with wallet-friendly £4 fares as it establishes new services in the scenic county. FlixBus has said from May 15 passengers would be able to use its service to commute to and from Newquay, Truro and Penzance. The company, which was founded in 2011, also has depots in Penryn, Plymouth and Exeter.

In celebration of their new venture, the company is tempting travellers with a special offer of £4 tickets to London.

This move is a cog in FlixBus’s plan to broaden its reach by 2025, which already includes recent forays into Gloucester and Swindon. Now with a network that stretches across more than 200 routes in England, Scotland, and Wales, FlixBus’s green coaches are becoming a familiar sight on Britain’s roads.

Andreas Schorling, FlixBus UK’s senior managing director, said: “Travel should be fun and affordable, and with FlixBus you can have it all! Demand for our iconic green coaches is growing fast, and we’re proud to bring Cornwall onto our expanding UK network.”

Bagging any of these super cheap promotional £4 tickets is possible starting from 15 May, with the deal running up until 30 June. Bargain hunters and explorers can snap them up via the Flix Bus website or through the FlixBus app, ready to roam across the company’s comprehensive constellation of destinations.

For those who love to explore the UK but prefer to go via ground-based means of transport, Ed Wise has a savvy trick. He managed to claim full refunds on all of his train tickets for a year, saving himself a tidy sum.

The 29-year-old cleverly predicted train delays on Avanti West Coast, meaning that every ticket he booked in 2023 was refunded. He reckons he’s saved at least £1,000 in less than three years since he started planning for delays.

Avanti West Coast offers customers a sliding scale of refunds for delays: 25% off for a 15 minute delay, 50% off for a 30 minute delay and a full refund for delays of an hour or more. Wise, who pens the personal finance newsletter Bunce with colleague Joe Manktelow-Pimm, said he paid “zero” and “rode for free”.

He revealed he began planning for delays after returning from a holiday in Italy, where he booked equivalent journeys for much cheaper prices. Wise said: “I was furious at how woefully inefficient and expensive UK trains were.” Even after buying a railcard, using ticket splitting and booking trips to cheaper stations, he found he was still paying a high amount and contending with delays.

He used three main factors to predict when trains would be delayed, which were strike action, planned engineering works and extreme weather. Strike action means operators are hit by staff shortages, and Wise found there was normally a knock-on effect of several days before and after the planned action.

Trade unions must give two weeks’ notice before planned industrial action, which Wise used as advance warning of delays.

Trains are occasionally intentionally delayed to allow for necessary engineering and maintenance work, according to National Rail’s website. The third factor in Wise’s “Train Delay Prediction Paradigm” is extreme weather conditions, which are likely to cause train delays.

He stated: “Combine planned engineering works and strike action with winter weather – your train will be delayed, no question about it.”