In message
, at
11:21:06 on Mon, 13 Apr 2009, Mizter T remarked:
There is a £3 refundable deposit for the card. You can either provide
your details and have it registered, or otherwise have an unregistered
card.

Isn't there some issue to do with refunding people with overseas
addresses?

The one alternative is to buy an Oyster card before you arrive in
London - if you live in certain countries VisitBritainDirect will sell
you a "Visitor Oyster card" in your local currency and send it to you
by post. See this webpage for more information (confusingly it refers
to Oyster PAYG using its old name "Pre-Pay"):
http://www.visitlondon.com/travel/oyster/

Note that "Visitor Oyster cards" are functionally the same as standard
Oyster cards, except (a) they are unregistered and (b) there isn't a
refundable deposit, rather there is a small fee charged instead.

And there are some vending machines that sell them. LHR T4 is such an
obvious place to have such a machine, I'm sure they won't have installed
one...
--
Roland Perry