Automatic Delay Repay on season tickets

[kristiang85]

SWR keep promising that next year delay repay will be automated on advance tickets and season tickets. Whilst I can see how it works on the advances (it's worked very well for me on Virgin), how on Earth does it work on season tickets? Given you touch in for the station and not your exact train, how will it know if you've been delayed or not?

e.g. I often get to WAT very early before my regular train and sometimes that means I've touched in just before a previous less fast/spacious one leaves, or indeed at the other end I'll faff a bit before touching out. Does anybody with technical know-how know how such a system will work reliably in practice?

(apologies if its been asked before, I did a search but couldn't find anything specifically on this).

 

[mrmatt]

ThamesLink's auto delay repay seems to look at both tap in and tap out time and if it finds a delayed train that matches (I assume the touch out helps determine the train and touch in the origin) it emails you with a link to claim. This is quicker than filling in the normal form as it just needs payment details. The emails normally arrive a couple of days later and if they don't you have to claim manually.

So on ThamesLink it's more of an automatic notification that you may be able to claim rather than automatic refund. And during the May timetable chaos it apparently couldn't cope so they turned it off!

 

[Wolfie]

So how does that work with paper tickets?

 

[andrewkeith5]

So how does that work with paper tickets?

It doesn’t.

It’s actually a very good system in my experience, although occasionally when all the trains are messed up it picks the wrong one, but you can override it and provide an explanation of your actual journey. It’s much more efficient than some schemes I’ve used.

 

[kristiang85]

It doesn’t.

It’s actually a very good system in my experience, although occasionally when all the trains are messed up it picks the wrong one, but you can override it and provide an explanation of your actual journey. It’s much more efficient than some schemes I’ve used.

Ah OK this makes more sense then; as long as you can override then that should work fine.

Thanks for the explanation

 

[andrewkeith5]

Ah OK this makes more sense then; as long as you can override then that should work fine.

Thanks for the explanation

Yeah it works pretty well I've had both situations where it's picked out a delayed train I wasn't actually on (i.e. I wasn't delayed, but I thought it was, in which case you can dismiss the alert) and cases where it's misidentified the train I was on and assumed I had taken a connecting route when I instead took the direct train which turned out to be more delayed, and in this case when I overrode the claim with the correct delay and provided details of the train I was actually on they paid out correctly.

In the case of the first situation, I guess it's going to be fairly unique to me as I often choose to take the slower train because it's much more comfortable....Everyone always rushes for the fastest trains, so the slower ones can be bliss!

If only there was some way GWR could be held to account more properly on the North Downs line