On Apr 16, 12:05*pm, redcat wrote:

Mizter T wrote:

On Apr 16, 8:20 am, wrote:

In article ,
(James Farrar) wrote:

[snip]

Or wait until you get to London and top up with cash?

Or with a credit card here, even?

Yes, that would work fine, and could be done at an Underground station
- either at the ticket office or one of the self-service ticket
machines.

I can't top it with a cc here, because for some odd reason when I bought
it last year (here, as offered by LT/Visit Britain) it required a UK
postal code. So, I put one in and the top up worked fine.

I'm curious at to specifically who you bought it from and how?
VisitBritainDirect only sell "Visitor Oyster cards" (that obviously
branded as such on the card) which are all unregistered, so it doesn't
sound as though it was them. TfL meanwhile only send Oyster cards
purchased from their online shop to UK addresses. Did you buy it from
an Underground station's ticket office, from a TfL Information Centre
or from a newsagents at all then?


Now they want the exact address my cc is associated with. OK. But I
cannot enter a US zip code into that field. It requires a UK one and
rejects anything else.

Unfortunately this is a fairly standard anti-fraud measure. Merchants
can easily run a check on UK-issued credit/debit cards using address
verification systems - it would seem that hooking up to similar
overseas systems is a somewhat harder task.

The Oyster PAYG system is an obvious potential target for fraud so TfL
have evidently decided to take the cautious path here.


**Thanks for everyone's help. So, you say I can take my existing oyster
and put it into a machine at a station and add credit card or cash
payment to it? ** Is there a list of stations where this can be done, or
can it be done at any?

As others have said, it's possible that the ticket machines won't like
credit/debit cards that don't have a chip (i.e. are magnetic stripe
only), but I don't know for certain what the situation is here.
However you'll definitely be able to use a magstripe-only credit card
at an Underground station ticket office to top up your Oyster PAYG
balance, i.e. over the counter.

Incidentally, there are ticket machines at all Underground stations
which are capable of topping up Oyster cards (indeed there are few if
any 'non-Oyster' ticket machines still around) - the 'big' ticket
machines take notes and coins (and give change) as well as taking
cards, whilst the smaller ones either take credit/debit cards only or
take cards and coins but don't give any change. There is at least one
'big' ticket machine at each station I think (definitely anywhere that
you'll conceivably end up going to).

Note that if you're arriving at Heathrow terminals 1, 2 or 3 I'd
recommend that you go to the TfL Travel Information Centre which is
directly opposite the entrance to the Underground station instead of
going to the station's own ticket office which can be pretty busy -
the Information Centre can sell you Oyster PAYG top-ups (and you can
pay however you'd like to) as well as provide you with other travel
information.