Can i be devil's advocate please to garner opinion surrounding season refunds.
Dougal and all his colleagues gets told to work from home starting Monday 16th March. He has a smart season that could clearly be interrogated and show he last used it at 1800 on Friday 13th March.
He only gets into the nearest station this morning to refund it. The £10 admin fee is now waived but the clerk refunds it using the standard refund operation on the ticket issuing system which puts today as "surrender" day. That means he's deemed to have used it today so the first refundable day is tomorrow !!!
Aschurch to Reading= £8924.00. Weekly= £223.10.
Ticket started 01-01-2020. So 2 months and 26 days used. Therefore 14.25 (factor for 2 months 26 days) x 223.10= £3179.20 used, take away from original cost, leaves £5744.80.
But had he surrendered on 13th March- 2 months and 13 days used. 13.19 (factor for 2 months 13 days) x 223.10= £2942.70 used, take away fro original cost, leaves £5981.30.
A difference of £236.50, which is fine if the employer is paying but if the passenger pays themself......
South Western Railway Twitter help has stated that people who do the right thing will not be penalised. Under those circumstances the fund should be when they stopped travelling.
Details on how all this would work are yet to be released.
I can't find the Tweet at the moment.
On a separate note refunds can't be processed by SWR right now. They do have an online form that can be filled in. Interestingly the additional comments section only allows 150 and if you go over that it says:
The field Additional Comments must be a string with a minimum length of 0 and a maximum length of 150.
At least I know one of their database fields is called Additional Comments. Or a variant of that as spaces between words isn't a recommended practice for field names.
On top of that there are three address lines that must be filled in, in addition to town and postcode.
Not everyone has three address fields that need filling in.
The shortest form of an address is:
Building number and street
Town
Postcode
So only that's 2 address lines redundant. You could needlessly split the building number and street up but there is still a third line you nay have no use of.
Someone wasn't thinking things through when they built that address form.