Not really a dispute, but I'd be interested to know what people think should have happened and what I should have done.
I was supposed to be travelling from Glasgow Central to Euston on 29th April, when the west coast mainline was severely disrupted. I checked my journey a couple of hours before I was due to travel - like they tell you to - and seeing the mess on the WCML, hot-footed it straight down to Central. Avanti weren't giving any very helpful information online about my train, and I couldn't find any Avanti staff on the concourse, but I saw on Avanti's twitter that there was ticket acceptance with LNER from Edinburgh, so I decided to go that way. However, there was at that point no ticket acceptance with Scotrail for Glasgow-Edinburgh (it appeared on Avanti's twitter several hours later) so the Scotrail guys on the barrier at Central wouldn't let me through unless I bought a ticket to Edinburgh. I didn't try to raise it with Avanti online as I would have missed the Edinburgh train while waiting for their answer.
Everything else went fairly smoothly and I made it back to London only just over 20 minutes later than scheduled, albeit after having spent 6 and a half hours travelling rather than 4 and a half. I put in a delay repay claim to Avanti for a 15-29 minute delay and also wrote to their customer services to reclaim the cost of the ticket I had to buy from Glasgow to Edinburgh. They have come back with delay repay for a delay of 120+ minutes, but say that they can't refund the extra ticket cost as I've received 100% of the cost of my original ticket.
This does mean I'm getting more money in repayment than I expected, so I'm not exactly complaining, but there do seem to me to be several things wrong with this:
1. Avanti's insistence that I was delayed for 120 minutes + when I've told them twice what my actual delay was. Am I leaving myself open to a fraud claim by accepting the payout?
2. The idea that refunding me the additional costs I incurred in re-routing myself in the face of what was obviously going to be a substantial delay is somehow limited by the cost of my original ticket. Or did I not have the right to get the additional ticket cost refunded at all?
3. Should the delay repay for a 120 minute + delay on Avanti be the cost of the return ticket, not just a single leg? I was on the second of a pair of advance singles, but they were bought together in one transaction and the ticket even says Return on it.
Am I misunderstanding the position, or are Avanti? Or are we both wrong?
I was supposed to be travelling from Glasgow Central to Euston on 29th April, when the west coast mainline was severely disrupted. I checked my journey a couple of hours before I was due to travel - like they tell you to - and seeing the mess on the WCML, hot-footed it straight down to Central. Avanti weren't giving any very helpful information online about my train, and I couldn't find any Avanti staff on the concourse, but I saw on Avanti's twitter that there was ticket acceptance with LNER from Edinburgh, so I decided to go that way. However, there was at that point no ticket acceptance with Scotrail for Glasgow-Edinburgh (it appeared on Avanti's twitter several hours later) so the Scotrail guys on the barrier at Central wouldn't let me through unless I bought a ticket to Edinburgh. I didn't try to raise it with Avanti online as I would have missed the Edinburgh train while waiting for their answer.
Everything else went fairly smoothly and I made it back to London only just over 20 minutes later than scheduled, albeit after having spent 6 and a half hours travelling rather than 4 and a half. I put in a delay repay claim to Avanti for a 15-29 minute delay and also wrote to their customer services to reclaim the cost of the ticket I had to buy from Glasgow to Edinburgh. They have come back with delay repay for a delay of 120+ minutes, but say that they can't refund the extra ticket cost as I've received 100% of the cost of my original ticket.
This does mean I'm getting more money in repayment than I expected, so I'm not exactly complaining, but there do seem to me to be several things wrong with this:
1. Avanti's insistence that I was delayed for 120 minutes + when I've told them twice what my actual delay was. Am I leaving myself open to a fraud claim by accepting the payout?
2. The idea that refunding me the additional costs I incurred in re-routing myself in the face of what was obviously going to be a substantial delay is somehow limited by the cost of my original ticket. Or did I not have the right to get the additional ticket cost refunded at all?
3. Should the delay repay for a 120 minute + delay on Avanti be the cost of the return ticket, not just a single leg? I was on the second of a pair of advance singles, but they were bought together in one transaction and the ticket even says Return on it.
Am I misunderstanding the position, or are Avanti? Or are we both wrong?
