On 31/03/2015 17:08, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at
08:46:13 on Tue, 31 Mar 2015, Matthew Dickinson
remarked:
SWT and London Midland have recently withdrawn Oyster at their ticket
windows, so they can't value any commission that much.

Possibly confirmation that Oyster is going to become much more niche -
only really for those of limited means, tourists and children, as
everyone else will use contactless instead.

What about commuters in London? Will they all migrate their in-boundary
Travelcards to ITSO, or is there a plan to link them to a contactless
card, and have it work throughout the Travelcard-valid estate?

One of the next stages of TfL's Future Ticketing Program is to allow
in-boundary Travelcards to be loaded onto the contactless back office

That's logical.

Meanwhile those of us deciding whether or not to buy outboundary
travelcards have a complex matrix of decisions based on how much out
particular TOC marks up (or discounts) the price when added to a London
Terminals Ticket, and how that all shifts around when buying off-peak,
or with a railcard discount, and also attempting to predict whether one
will hit any of the caps is travelling ad-hoc.

If they can stick *all* of that into the contactless system and
guarantee to offer the best deal from the numerous potential
combinations, that would be great. But how the ordinary traveller is
supposed to audit that, I have no idea.

Ha, well I can't really see the above happening!


And they haven't got a clean track record so far with Oyster capping,
where all they promise[1] turns out to be to cap to the cheapest
Travelcard that would once upon a time have been available for purchase,
and not try to work out if a slightly cheaper travelcard plus one single
from that card's boundary, might have worked out less expensive.

They've perhaps wormed their way out of that corner now by pretty much
having a flat fare for all paper day travelacrds.

[1] Mizter T can correct me if I'm wrong.

You are wrong, sorry!

If you do enough journeys within say zones 1&2 to reach a cap, and then
make a journey out to zone 6 (e.g. last day being a tourist in London
then out to Heathrow), you'll be capped for z1&2 and then pay a z3-z6
journey on top.

Since Jan 2015 things are a bit simpler (though I don't approve coz it's
much more expensive for some) - there's now one daily cap for Tube/rail,
rather than peak and off-peak caps.