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

Walter Briscoe · April 14th 16, 02:13 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message of Thu, 14
Apr 2016 08:21:58 in uk.transport.london,
writes
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.

You might like to consider taking a photo of the last 8 transactions at
a POM (Passenger Operated Machine).
Tourist Information Offices still issue paper statements.
I can't find a list on tfl.gov.uk, but have used them at Euston, King's
Cross St Pancras and Liverpool Street and believe there is another at
Heathrow Terminals 1, 2 3. There are probably others.
--
Walter Briscoe