Charging for seat reservations really isn’t a good idea. Just think where it would end up:
Window seat £10
Table seat £10
Seat with a window view £5
Seat with no view £3
Or "sit anywhere in any seat, no reservation" £0. This isn't a proposal to introduce compulsory reservations.
Then what happens when seat reservations aren’t displayed (which is frequent). Who’s going to process the refund?
LNER manage to do this if you don't get a seat, so I would imagine the same process would be followed. It doesn't appear to be rocket science to me.
What happens where a connection is missed onto a train where I’d paid for a seat reservation? How do I get a refund?
Delay Repay.
There are many more scenarios I could think of…
Ultimately most of these are "it seems too hard", when in fact this sort of thing works perfectly well on many European networks with far greater standards of service than here. If Delay Repay didn't exist and someone proposed it on this forum today, there would be a fusillade of objections and "too hard" in the replies. While Delay Repay is far from perfect, I don't see many people calling for its abolition because it's too hard or too complicated.
Imagine Delay Repay was proposed by an anonymous poster for a moment:
"What happens if the delay wasn't the railway's fault?"
"Some people travel on more than one ticket, even sometimes combinations of seasons, rovers, singles - what do you do about that?"
"What if there is more than one delay on an itinerary?"
"What if the delay was caused by staff saying a train was too full to board but it still ran on time?"
"What if the person doesn't have a bank account? Are we going to have to give them special vouchers or something?"
"What happens if one train was only 5 minutes late but a 2 hourly connection was missed, seems unfair to hang £200 of delay repay for a return ticket on that?"
That all sounds like it's quite difficult and complicated, but ultimately the wit of man manages to overcome these problems.
Britain is a significant cultural outlier in that reservations are mostly ignored and treated as worthless. This has big customer service implications for long distance travellers and works against people who really value them - perhaps for pleasure or convenience, or perhaps for mobility or accessibility reasons (eg needing an aisle).