Fare Dealer
RAIL fares expert Barry Doe says some rail companies lack the John Lewis attitude to customer service.
IN RAIL 906’s The Fare Dealer, I mentioned the problem a reader was having with a £100 Rail Travel Voucher that would expire in June.
I discussed this with the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which told me they (the RDG) would have to take it up with the Department for Transport. I added in RAIL 907 that, after six weeks, the DfT had at last agreed to extend the validity of any voucher that expired or will expire between March 17 and September 16 2020 by six months.
I consider this unnecessarily mean. After all, the industry loses nothing by such an extension, yet a voucher that was due to have expired in late March will still expire in late September, and we can’t say for sure if people will be free to travel as they wish by that time.
In the meantime, I have been contacted by several readers who told me they had already received new vouchers (or in one case, a refund to his online account) by simply going to the Customer Services of the respective operator who issued the voucher.
In one case an operator required a photo of the voucher cut in half taken after the expiry date, while another simply asked for the old vouchers (which hadn’t yet expired) to be returned.
One advantage here is that where it was a replacement voucher the new one is valid for another year - just as, quite obviously, the DfT should have allowed in the first place.
I advise all those in this situation to try going to the operator first. But, if they refuse, then there is a way to get around it.
Close to the time that the voucher expires,
use it to buy a walk-on ticket to anywhere. Say you have a £100 voucher, then buy a ticket to somewhere that costs around £100. You then immediately surrender the ticket for a refund and, because the ticket was bought with a voucher, you will get the refund as a voucher valid a year from that date. Unfortunately, you will lose a £10 refund admin fee, but that’s better than losing it all.
To be sure of my facts, I took this workaround to the RDG, which said that was correct. Indeed, there might also be a further benefit.
It’s unlikely you’ll find a fare that matches your voucher exactly. So, say you buy a £105 walk-on ticket. You use the voucher to pay £100 and cash or card to pay the extra £5. You’ll then get a £95 refund. However, as you partpaid in cash/card, you might then receive the entire refund in cash or back to your card.
It seems that this depends on the Ticket Issuing system that the particular ticket-office uses, so it’s something you should discuss with the clerk at the time.
How sad that the rail industry has to be so ungenerous in dealing with vouchers during a time of emergency. None of this would happen in a supermarket. As I have often said, it’s not the ‘John Lewis approach’ to retailing.
I am very grateful to the RDG for this information, not least as it’s a back-door way around the problem, albeit a legitimate one.
In RAIL 905, I dealt with refunds on season tickets for those who inevitably had to cease using them.
Some readers said I seemed to support the method whereby someone who paid £4,000 for an Annual Season and who had to stop using it after six months would only receive £1,696 refund, as it’s based on what he or she would have spent on a six-month ticket.
I should have emphasised that I was only quoting the way the calculations are done, for I most certainly do not support the method in the current emergency. Once again, it’s far from the ‘John Lewis approach’ - the refund should have been pro-rata as a temporary measure.
A booking clerk has told me a way around this if you didn’t have long remaining on the ticket, although I rather fear it will be too late for most people.
It seems that if you change your season to another journey, then you are credited with the remaining time pro-rata the rate you paid for the season. So, for example, if you had a £4,000 Annual with a month remaining, rather than getting nothing back (as an 11-month season would be the annual price anyway, as I explained in RAIL 905), you’d have £333.30 credit for the month.
You then opt for a change to, say, a Lichfield Trent Valley to Lichfield City season - the country’s cheapest! That’s £180 for an Annual. However, you only buy the remaining month (because the new ticket must expire when your old Annual would have done) and that month will also be calculated pro-rata - that is, £15!
So, you end up with a monthly season you don’t want, but a £318.30 cash refund (£333.30 - £15) and no admin fee.
Again, how extraordinary that a back-door method such as this will elicit a genuine refund that the official method would not allow, even in a national emergency. The industry has not even begun to learn how to treat its most loyal customers.