On 02/01/2014 20:46, Clive Page wrote:

On 02/01/2014 16:24, tim...... wrote:

If TfL are expecting your average foreign tourist to start paying for
tickets using "pay wave" credit cards I think that they are tilting at
windmills

I walk from St.Pancras to King's Cross tube station quite frequently and
continue to be surprised at the number of arrivals from Eurostar who
head straight to the enormously long queue for the ticket office, when
there are plenty of ticket machines with no queue or only a small one.

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility
of using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in
the Netherlands) if you are a non-native. I recall arriving at the RER
station in Charles de Gaulle a few years ago and finding that the ticket
machines accepted neither UK credit cards nor Euro notes. I was able to
avoid the extremely long queue only by being able to feed in at least
two dozen small coins (which fortunately I had left over from a previous
trip).

Annoying that (all?) the RER and Metro ticket machines don't take notes,
but they should accept UK cards these days (there used to be problems
when the French had their own chip-and-PIN system, before the adoption
of the EMV standard.)