London Banter - View Single Post - TfL, Oyster, contactless payment cards and Apple Pay.

[email protected] · April 14th 16, 01:21 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Tony
Dragon) wrote:

On 12/04/2016 12:49, David Cantrell wrote:
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 06:51:44PM -0500,
wrote:
(Paul Corfield) wrote:
If I was in your shoes I'd just set up auto top up on Oyster and use
that. That deals with your issues around lack of a convenient "top up"
location or you forgetting to top up.
How does that work if only using buses? Any online top ups I've ever
made had to be "collected" at a tube station gateline.

I believe that you still need to visit a tube station to turn auto-topup
on, but once it's turned on auto-topup definitely works on buses. You
still need to visit a station though - any station, not just a tube
station - to pick up PAYG refunds for the inevitable overcharging if you
bother to claim them.

My Oyster Card is registered, I have auto top up, if I ever have had
a refund it tops up my oyster card.

The system also gets to know your regular journeys and will auto
refund if something unusual happens.

Getting a refund by phone takes less than five minutes, I have never
had a problem.

On one occasion I had a refund after I made a call, then the system
did an auto refund.

I have only ever been overcharged because of my mistakes or because a
train has been cancelled after I touched in and I had to use bus
instead of train.

Sadly not in my case. My wife and I made a return trip through Heathrow
Terminal 5. My Oyster exit wasn't registered centrally (though it was on the
card) on the outward journey and my wife's entry wasn't registered inwards.
You have to watch the system like a hawk. Earlier my wife didn't get
registered at one end of King's Cross to Westminster return journey on both
outward and return legs. She didn't even notice the overcharge until she
used the card again about a year later. It took ages to persuade TfL to sort
that out, despite the evidence on the card. Again the central system didn't
have the data. Hence my concern that one can't get printouts of the data on
the card any more.

The refund can be collected within 14 days at a train station, once
when I did not use a train (over Christmas) within the 14 days I
received an e-mail asking if I wanted the time extended.

I also get a spreadsheet showing my Oyster journeys for a week
emailed to me.

The only problem I have (and it's not that bad) is I have to keep my
Oyster & my Freedom Card separate.

For London residents who are regular public transport users this is fine.
Even when I worked in London 3 days a week I found it a problem to pick up
refunds because you have to set it up to collect it at a nominated gateline.
I didn't use public transport much in London while working there because I
took my bike on the train from and to Cambridge. Sometimes I stayed in
Putney and took the train from Vauxhall but at too short a notice to set up
a refund there.

--
Colin Rosenstiel