What is the entitlement if, having used the outward portion normally, one opts not to use the return half of a ticket because of serious delay?
Does one get half of the return price, or just the difference between the cost of the return and the cost of a single?
There is nothing in the NRCoT which explicitly states the amount to be refunded in such circumstances, albeit internal industry guidance is that 50% should be refunded.
If you come across a retailer that doesn't want to offer this level of refund, you would would have to rely on:
- the provisions of the Passenger Rights and Obligations Regulation (PRO), specifically Article 16(a), although this only applies for anticipated delays of 61+ minutes - there is precedent from EU261 (the equivalent regulation for the aviation industry) that such refunds are proportional to the distance actually travelled vs the planned total distance,
- the Consumer Rights Act 2015, specifically section 56 (although this only applies where the service is not provided with reasonable care and skill, or in compliance with anything included as a term of the contract under section 50), or
- any term you could argue to be implied in the contract, stating that a partial refund due to disruption will be proportional rather than based on the equivalent single fare.
Clearly, not all circumstances will fall into one of the first two categories, and it is more complex to argue the case for a proportional refund under the last category.
And herein hangs a tale. Some while ago I booked a cheap Advance to Sheffield, but then my plans changed and I didn’t need to travel. The lowish price of the ticket made a change (£10 admin fee) not worthwhile and at the time there was no refund for Advances. So I basically decided I’d bin the ticket. Come the day though, just out of curiosity, I checked RTT to see if the train I’d booked had run on time and found it ran around 20 minutes late. So instead of binning the ticket I decided to request a fee-free refund. Th retailer EMR initially turned it down but after I responded, pointing out the Ts&Cs, I was refunded. The moral of the story is: don’t discard an Advance you’re not going to use until the train has ran. I suspect someone will be along sooner or later to tell me what I did was immoral because, even before the delay happened, I had no intention of traveling. But I regard it as using the terms and conditions to my advantage for a change.
The NRCoT don't state any requirement that your decision not to travel must be predicated on the disruption. It simply states that if your booked/intended train is delayed or cancelled (et al),
and you decide not to travel, you can get a full refund - without any connection between the two (such as "and
therefore").
Obviously it must be very much an edge case scenario for someone to have already decided not to travel
and for their train then to be delayed or cancelled, but it certainly does happen from time to time and when it does, ticket holders are quite entitled to make use of this (arguably unintended) right.
The £10 admin fee levied by most retailers is likely to be disproportionate to the actual cost of administering a refund through the usual automated processes. It's thus rather ironic that the only way to get a fee-free refund is to make the retailer incur something closer to £10 in admin costs, as disruption related refunds are usually done manually!
