LNWR dragging their feet

[Grumpy Git]

During a two-legged return journey back in late November, (both of which were on LNWR services), I got the dreaded message to say the first of my return legs had been cancelled.

Although the cancelled train was only the penultimate service, taking the next (last) train would have resulted in me missing my connection and being stranded without a 45 mile/1 hour taxi ride. I immediately called their helpline and sought permission to use a taxi for the cancelled leg, (which in the event was about 10 miles and took less than 20 minutes and cost me £20). They verbally agreed and also agreed to my request for an email to back this up.

The email confirmation duly arrived in good time before I needed to make my return trip. I made a claim for the refund of my taxi fare, supported by their email and my taxi receipt abou two or three days later in early December. The last correspondence from them was 28th December, saying:

Thank you for contacting us. I am sorry we have not yet been in touch with a response. It can take us longer than ten working days to respond when we have an increase in correspondence, or when an in-depth investigation is required. Please be assured we will contact you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience throughout this process.

To date, I'm still to receive their approval to repay me (despite them giving me this at the time), I guess it will them take them another 'age' to actually send me the money. Why are they so inefficient given such a cut and dry claim (and saving them a small fortune, by planning ahead and not taking a taxi for a much longer leg)?

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Why are they so inefficient given such a cut and dry claim (and saving them a small fortune, by planning ahead and not taking a taxi for a much longer leg)?

Christmas and no one being in the office?

 

[Bletchleyite]

It's just taken them about 3 weeks to approve my Delay Repay claim (and the money hasn't arrived several days later), so I think they do have rather a backlog, probably from that day in December I was caught up in when near enough nothing operated for about 5 hours combined with holidays.

 

[gray1404]

I would wait for them to reply. It is unlikely they will refuse given you had it confirmed in writing already. Just wait a while longer which I know is frustrating. You can be confident they have not lost your correspondence as they have sent you a holding email due to their backlog.

However I think they really should have offered to arrange a taxi on their account given they agreed to it in advance. That way you would not have been out of pocket.

 

[Deafdoggie]

The staff work at the speed of their trains. Just one thing every three hours & cancelling the next two things they were going to do.

 

[Starmill]

Christmas and no one being in the office?

The customer relations department is only closed for the two days on which no trains run of course. Other days the call centre and customer contact services are running, albeit the non-working days among them may be covered differently to working days. The latter is something predictable that the business should be prepared for. At most two days of delay are therefore attributable to this. For a genuinely unusual circumstance requiring a high value payout I could understand some further delay but this appears not to be relevant here.

An exceptionally large number of complaints and contacts following bad weather and industrial action is a little bit more difficult to forsee, but I would question if it's genuinely exceptional or just a predictable increase in contacts for which the company have been merely caught unprepared for.

 

[robbeech]

To be quite honest, sometimes during major disruption you'll find things like delay repay get paid faster than "normal" as the threshold for just paying it to get through the huge numbers of claims is much lower. This case may be a bit more manually involved though sadly.

 

[Grumpy Git]

Now 25 days since their last correspondence, so with a few minutes free I thought I call their customer service telephone.

20 minutes on hold and never moved up the queue from 'number 2'. That says it all really, they're absolutely hopeless!

 

[All Line Rover]

I believe there is one person working in their head office. Three calls per hour is understandably the most they can handle.