Now I've heard some strange, illogical, incorrect things about tickets in the past, but what I was told today is right up there with the strangest. I was seeking to obtain a simple excess from an Off-Peak Day Return to an Anytime Day Return for a ticket I had bought online in Advance, a journey for which I now needed to leave in the peak. The cost of the excess was £1.75. When I presented my ticket at the window the clerk told me, and I quote, that she couldn't excess it as they didn't deal with TOD (Ticket on Departure) at the ticket office. (That is incorrect in itself as other staff at the same ticket office have in the past issued me with TOD tickets from the ticket office when the machine had failed to print them.) She told me that the correct process was to not pick up the tickets, to seek a refund from the retailer and to purchase the new ticket as I required. I tried to explain that this would incur a £10 admin fee but she was insistent that it wouldn't, as they don't charge the admin fee if you don't pick up the tickets. (This wasn't a Southern station so it's not as if she was getting Southern's 'rainy day guarantee' confused with a blanket policy.) I persisted and she did 'try to do it'. Unsurprisingly she was able to issue the excess without any problems. I don't understand how excessing a TOD ticket is different to issuing any other ticket, or how this clerk had decided that she was unable to issue an excess. If I hadn't have persisted, and hadn't have known anything about tickets, she probably would have sold me a new ticket and left me with the impression that I would have been able to obtain a refund free of charge on the original tickets.
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You Can't Excess a TOD Ticket
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Inappropriate training could have been an issue, or that she could have just made the rules up for a variety of reasons.
It is not uncommon to hear obscure reasons for refusing to do an excess, for whatever reason I would not like to speculate. Last time I was told that my ticket could not be excessed because it was paid for by a warrant. That was at the Virgin ticket office at New Street. I duly went over to the gateline staffed by LM people, and obtained the excess with no problem whatsoever.
It is not uncommon to hear obscure reasons for refusing to do an excess, for whatever reason I would not like to speculate. Last time I was told that my ticket could not be excessed because it was paid for by a warrant. That was at the Virgin ticket office at New Street. I duly went over to the gateline staffed by LM people, and obtained the excess with no problem whatsoever.
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