Advance-purchase windows on overnight coaches

People who book an overnight coach are often buying a bed as much as a ride. They compare the fare with a cheap hotel plus a morning train, not with the daytime coach on the same route. That comparison starts earlier. In files we have read, a useful share of overnight seats is held six to eight weeks out, then goes quiet, then a second wave appears in the last ten days from people whose hotel fell through.

Daytime seats on the same corridor can still be selling in the last forty-eight hours to people who missed a rail connection. If you copy the daytime ladder onto the night coach, you either give away sleeper-equivalent seats too early or you hold them so late that the first wave books a hotel instead.

We like to draw two booking curves on the same axes, one for departures between 05:00 and 20:00 and one for the rest. The overnight curve is not a scaled-down daytime curve. It has a shoulder, a trough, and a late scramble, and the trough is where well-meant discounts often sit — aimed at a customer who already decided.

If you only have totals by route, ask whoever runs the reservation export to keep departure hour. Without the hour, an overnight reading is guesswork, and we will say so in the constraints section of a quote rather than invent a curve.