Compensation payouts grow as long rail delays add up
PASSENGERS LOST at least 3.6m hours due to significantly delayed trains in 2016/17, according to new research.
Delays of at least half an hour affected 7.2m passenger journeys in Britain, consumer group Which? said.
It found Virgin Trains East Coast services suffered the highest proportion of significant delays. Some 3.7 percent of its services ran between 30 minutes and two hours late. This was followed by Virgin Trains West Coast (two percent) and Cross-Country (1.1 percent).
The findings come ahead of average fare increases of 3.4 per cent set to be introduced on Tuesday.
A separate poll of 8,200 UK adults by Which? found that two in five commuters, and just over half of leisure passengers, claimed they were not advised about their rights to compensation when they were last entitled to a payout.
Alex Hayman, managing director of public markets at Which? said delays suffered by passengers are “even more infuriating” when they struggle to claim compensation.
“If train companies can’t simplify unnecessarily complex claims systems for delayed customers, then government must press for automatic compensation to be introduced across the industry so that people can get the money they are owed,” he said.
Paul Plummer, chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, representing train operators and Network Rail, agreed that it should be easy to claim compensation.
He said: “More operators are introducing automatic refunds and, in the last five years, the amount of compensation paid out has increased five-fold to £45m a year.”
A Virgin Trains spokesman said: “Clearly, it’s harder to run trains exactly to time over a 400mile route, and around 80 percent of delays are outside of our control.”
The spokesman added that the operator had introduced “industry-leading” automatic compensation on its West Coast route.