Take the Leap, but first get used to its quirks!

A very clunky, at times maddening, top-up system, an app that lets down iPhone owners and a confusing tag-on system... but the Leap Card is still a must-have

The bus driver stared at me stoney-faced. Likewise the queue of impatient passengers I was holding up because, yet again, the Leap card I thought I had topped up, was empty. ‘But I put money in it the other day,’ I protested, to no avail. After fumbling unsuccessfully for coins, I had to fork out a fiver. Even more annoyingly, unlike every other business in the history of commerce, Dublin Bus doesn’t do change. They give you a receipt which you can use to get your change from an office in town. But they know nobody does that because it would cost even more time and money to get there! Grrrr.

My Leap card was empty because I had made the understandable assumption that when you top up online, you can use your card the next day. But nothing with Leap topups is that simple.

When you top up your card online, then you must select where you activate the top-up from. Then you have to go there and top it up.

You can select outlets such as Dart stations and Luas stops. Why must a top-up that already involved filling out forms online be ‘activated’ – and why should you have elect a particular place to do it?

You can activate your card from an app on your phone but this applies only to Android phones.

So why penalise iPhone users like me? Dermot O’Gara, of the National Transport Authority, told me: ‘Apple restricts the access to the NFC capability on iPhones and primarily restricts the usage to Apple Pay and some other simple functions... NTA hopes that Apple will open this capability up in the future so as to allow NTA to release an iOS version of the Leap NFC App.’

Fine, I’ll use automatic top-up. But this is even more needlessly complex. First you go through the online process of signing up. Then, a few days later, Leap deducts money from your bank account.

With most companies, that would it – job done. But not Leap. It has invented a little game. It deducts two cents from your account and in so doing includes a secret code in that transfer.

You must constantly log in to your bank account to note what that code is and then send it back with more form-filling. If you don’t have an online account, hard luck.

If you miss it within the timeframe allowed, as I did, the two cents is returned and you must start the whole rigmarole all over again.

Most companies are glad to grab our money off us. So what does Leap operator the NTA make it so hard to pay? Other measures which appear to cause obstacles to topping up your card are security measures designed to protect customers. I would suggest that this has more to do with the fact that the NTA is a State agency and therefore more interested in ticking bureaucratic boxes than pleasing its customers.

I’m not the only one to note these annoying quirks. An online article in the Dailyedge.ie listed no fewer than ‘17 frustrations of using a Leap card’.

Another one I forgot to mention is this: if you’re travelling less than 13 stops, get the driver to tag on or you’ll pay the maximum fare. For

years, albeit intermittently, I’d been using the machine on the right hand side of the bus for all journeys, which automatically charges the maximum fare. Ouch! This little quirk is probably mentioned somewhere but it should be better flagged.

The Leap card is a technologically brilliant idea – let down by a failure to seamlessly grasp other aspects payment technology that other companies master without fuss.

Leap allows you to flit across our major cities (apologies to Kilkenny) on multiple transport systems with a single card. It even works with many private operators and can cut the cost of travel by up to 30%. There are further discounts if you use multiple trips within 90 minutes on bus and rail journeys.

Everyone should get a Leap card, even if you only use public transport occasionally. It saves time, hassle and money.

Total sales of Leap cards passed 2.5 million last year.

Surely with such an income they can come up with a better top-up system?