Dear Sir or Madam,
I submitted a delay repay claim on 3 October for a heavily delayed Motherwell to Liverpool journey which I undertook on Friday 29th September. Reference number for the delay repay claim is X and for subsequent email correspondence X. I am very unhappy with the way my claim has been processed and it feels as though I am constantly being obstructed. I am writing to request an urgent resolution to my claim.
A timeline of events:
- Claim submitted via TPE online form
- Asked to provide missing legs of the journey via email however I had already given the full journey. This was intended to be Motherwell to Liverpool direct with TPE but I also had to take Avanti and Northern trains to complete the journey due to heavy delays and a cancelled train.
- I called customer services asking for help as I didn't know what else to submit. They told me to put the details of my journey in an email which I did.
- After a considerable delay I was told my email had been passed to the delay repay team who then got back to me saying I needed to send information to an appeal email even though I had made no mention of an appeal and don't remember receiving any such email address.
- I rang customer services again who said they would flag internally to progress the appeal as I was unable to do so. When I asked if there was any more information I could provide to help them I was suddenly told that I needed to send a QR code for the ticket purchased with Scotrail even though your own website said a booking confirmation would be fine. Your web form states the following:
"Please provide an image or scan of one of the following:
The PDF of the eTicket that was emailed to you, not a screenshot of the ticket on your phone.
Booking receipt, displaying your booking reference, journey details and price paid.
As this is an expired m-ticket in the Scotrail app, I no longer have the QR code and Scotrail refused to resend it when I contacted them. I am therefore not sure why your colleague said this was required on the phone, especially when this wasn't even flagged as an issue when I originally submitted the claim. All it served to do was introduce an extra layer of difficulty into an already very frustrating claim. Even if I had been able to access the QR code in the app, your own guidance above says a screenshot of this would not be accepted and I was never sent one via email.
Throughout this process your staff have been very unhelpful and appear to be quite poorly trained in respect of multiple tickets being used for the same journey, as is the case here. The response from two of your colleagues was mainly confusion about my journey and tickets followed by obstruction and making things even more complicated, rather than an attempt to resolve things there and then. The very slow response to emails to your customer service inbox and inability to upload free text in the delay repay form makes things even worse.
I have tried to be patient using the normal channels but from the information above I am sure you can understand why I have decided to escalate this to a complaint. I am writing to ask for this to be escalated to a more senior level and resolved swiftly, within the next week please. If this is not dealt with satisfactorily I intend to escalate to the Rail Ombudsman.
While I understand this is slightly complex due to the first ticket not being used to its full validity, your passenger charter clearly states "If you have a combination of tickets for your journey, we will compensate you for the whole journey". I do understand that the Wigan to Stoke aspect of the Motherwell to Stoke ticket wasn't part of my final journey, so would understand if there was a need to reduce the compensation in light of this. However, the fact remains that I had valid tickets for a Motherwell to Liverpool journey, which I finished over 3 hours late, so I should be entitled to compensation.
To summarise, my journey was from Motherwell to Liverpool and I intended to take the direct train at 12.21 all the way to Liverpool, as reflected on the form. I was using two tickets due to a change of plan, one from Motherwell to Stoke and the other from Wigan to Liverpool. The 12.21 TPE service was heavily delayed and cancelled at Carlisle. I then got an Avanti train to Preston, another Avanti train to Wigan and finally a Northern service to Liverpool to eventually complete my journey at 19.09. This was due to the signalling issues on the West Coast Mainline which caused heavy disruption.
I look forward to a prompt resolution to this issue and the payment of the appropriate level of compensation for my delay.
Yours faithfully,
David
