Travelling beyond season ticket range using a smartcard.

[bugbugbugbug]

Hello there!

I recently bought a monthly season ticket from Hampton Court to Earlsfield and loaded it onto a SWR smartcard. To use it, I just tap in and tap out on the readers using the smartcard.

However, occasionally I would like to travel to London Waterloo. To do this I can take the same train (same line), but I simply get off a few stations later. Naturally, I would like to use my season ticket to cover the Hampton Court - Earlsfield part of the journey, and only buy a ticket for the Earlsfield - Waterloo stretch. However, I'm not sure how I could go about doing this (at least not without having to get off the train at Earlsfield).

If I tap in with my smartcard at Hampton Court, I'm assuming it won't let me tap out at Waterloo. I could use the ticket to tap out at Waterloo, but then I would have an incomplete journey on my smartcard and be charged the maximum fare for it. The only way I can see this working is if I load the Earlsfield - Waterloo ticket onto my smartcard as well, but I'm not sure if that will work: how will it know I am using a combination of the season ticket + regular ticket?

Any advice?

 

[OscarH]

Someone may well correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is unless you are using Pay as you Go, or are relying on tapping in to activate a flexi-season, the short answer is it doesn't care about such detail - if any of the stored tickets is a valid ticket to enter at Hampton Court the barrier will "use" that ticket to open, and similarly if any are valid to exit at Waterloo it'll use that one to exit. There is no requirement to tap in or out for normal day or season tickets, so not tapping at the split point is fine.

 

[Watershed]

If you have a season ticket loaded onto your smartcard, having an incomplete journey on your smartcard - having either touched in or out within your season's area of validity - wouldn't cause you to be charged anything. You would only be charged if you touched in/out beyond where your season ticket is valid.

You can just buy a ticket from Earlsfield to London Terminals (either in paper format, or on your smartcard) and that will be fine - you don't need to get off and touch out at Earslfield. It would be a bit cheaper to do so, because paper/smartcard singles/returns within the London Zones are generally more expensive than Oyster/contactless PAYG fares. But the price difference isn't huge.

 

[Haywain]

You should look into SWR Touch, which is a smartcard based PAYG system. If that is added to your smartcard you would ge able to touch in at Hampton Court and out at Waterloo and would get charged the fare not covered by your season ticket at the end of the day.

 

[HandyHat]

If you load the ticket onto the smartcard, the system will understand that you are using a combination of the two tickets.

In fact if you enable Tap2Go on your smartcard, it'll automatically pay as you go beyond the validity of your season ticket (i.e. Earlsfield to Waterloo in your specific case).

Tap2Go may actually end up being cheapest because SWR's system will automatically calculate what the cheapest fare available for you would be - whether than be the Oyster fare or the National Rail ticket fare discounted with any railcards you have (as long as you've added them to your smartcard).