GWR Delay Repay experience

Away with the family and have a relatively new experience for me of a GWR Delay Repay claim. Interested in other regular GWR experiences as it feels like they have set all sorts of barriers to clear to accept a claim!

On the face of it all should be straightforward as we were stuck on a train caught up in a trespass incident on the Paignton branch yesterday afternoon. It was towards three hours before we were directed to take the local bus a little while after reversing back to Torre. When we eventually got to Newton Abbot we scanned our tickets to gain access to the platform, so our whereabouts should be visible.

However, today we have had our claims (three separate ones) rejected for three separate reasons, and two of the appeals rejected too. The reasons were:

1. Only delayed ten minutes at end destination (suspect caused by the service being reformed at Newton Abbot).
2. Duplicate claim (suspect this was not recognising the second ticket reference is one letter different).
3. We avoided the delay (not got much of a theory on that one).

I have had to go to great lengths to log a case via a link provided by the X Team, and share evidence (via X Team) including Realtime trains extracts, ticket screenshots and photos of the bus tickets issued to us.

Am waiting with interest to what comes next, but wondered if this is standard for GWR?

Delay repay is treated so stupidly by the industry and those who process the claims.

In my day (gosh, that’s 10 years ago now or more!) you’d really just accept the passenger’s explanation they were delayed especially for a low value claim. You should accept by default and only decline if there is a clear error by the passenger (or fraud!). I used to call customers if the claim auto-declined to find out a narrative of what happened, I cannot ever recall anyone taking the mickey.

Declining a claim means the customer will probably come back and expend more staff time appealing it and like the company a bit less.

Or dislike the company a bit more.

If anyone who works for a TOC processing delay repay claims is in a position to shed light on what staff have been told by management (and I tend to think they must have been told something to account for the spate of spurious refusals of obviously valid claims the OP, I and others have encountered of late), then I am sure many of us on the forum would be very interested to learn what it is?

Both my last delay repay claims have been with GWR - the last one (last week - points failure+bridge strike) paid out in 2 days, though it was a faff taking screenshots of the e-ticket to upload, and having to manually copy in the ticket reference.

One last October took much longer, but paid out - suspect that was complicated by the final destination being Zone U1 (after starting on a Sunday on the shambles that has been the Cotswold Line on occasion....)

Neither should have been particularly complicated, unlike your one sounds.

Straightforward claims are automated and usually resolved in 1-2 days. Anything more complex gets referred to a human (things like multiple changes, multiple TOCs, cross London) and can take a while.

More claims are being rejected as there seems to be an industry wide reduction in customer service standards. Customer service is being seen as an unnecessary cost - you're only on the train because it was the only (tolerable) option so why spend money retaining loyalty.

Update - The third ticket claim was paid after my (identical to the other two) appeals, and the first and second claim have now also been paid after being reinstated by the customer service team, the new claims on the GWR system state 'agent error'.

After a frustrating week and being caught in much disruption, EMR provided similar challenges, rejecting our three (pretty complex) claims due to duplicate tickets. After checking in with the X team it was confirmed there was no duplication, and the issue appeared to be my combination of single and return split tickets was all too much for the system. Anyway, these have been approved too and my 100% claims sucess record maintained.

Not sure if its the efforts to process claims quickly, or a general effort to discourage claims that I have had to battle with!

I recently submitted 2 delay repays with GWR and got a result quickly, but got under awarded only 50% - the system thought I travelled on a train which my split ticket wouldn't have actually allowed me to use

On routes I use regularly, GWR are remarkably good at paying out and probably the best TOC for it... they don't quibble any of mine, and their seat guarantee is very generous.

Contrast this to WMT who couldn't be bothered to process my claim for a very low value ticket, resulting in a *much* more expensive trip for them to the Ombudsman...