Light at the end of the compensation claim tunnel
SOMETHING that has never been explained well by National Rail is how to go about claiming compensation when your journey involves several operators.
Say you buy a ticket from Operator A, then travel with Operators B, C and D, and during that journey C has a delay which leads to your missing a connection with D and you eventually arrive 45 minutes late.
Do you go to the operator from whom you bought the ticket, or the one that was the main leg? No, you always go to the operator that caused the delay, but the amount you receive is always based on the total price of your throughout ticket, calculated using the Charter Conditions of the operator at fault.
So in this case you go to C. Now it might be that operators A, B and D offer 50% of a single back for being 45 mins late, whereas C offers nothing under an hour (the minimum under National Conditions of Carriage), in which case you get nothing.
However, it might well be that C offers 50%, while the others offer nothing, in which case you get 50% of the whole ticket price back. As new franchises are let they all offer Delay Repay, so it won’t be long before all operators offer the same amount (and it would be 50% of a single or 25% of a return over 29 mins). However, there will still be some who are even more generous and pay out after 14 minutes.
Where some operators still make a mistake is in offering the correct discount but only on
their portion of the journey. If this happens, go back and insist on the amount for the whole journey. Incidentally, under Delay Repay, for season tickets the compensation method is now the same. No more “void days”: if you’re 30 minutes late you get 50% of a “notional single” back, where that single is 10% of a weekly, 2.5% of a monthly (and pro-rata), or an annual divided by 464.
Now a £100 weekly ticket is £384 a month or £4000 a year, so the partial refund would be based on £10 if you had a weekly, £9.60 if you held a monthly and £8.62 if you held an annual.
Finally, note that the only time you go to the operator who sold you the ticket is if the train you intended to use is cancelled or delayed and you decide not to travel. You then get a full refund on any ticket, even advance.
Note under National Conditions (para 30.2) this also applies if you have begun your journey but are unable to complete it owing to delay or cancellation and return to your point of origin.