Promise to Pay notices from Northern TVMs

[james2trains]

My local station has just become a Penalty Fares station with Northern requiring you to print out a Promise to Pay notice from the TVM. On my last visit a couple of days ago, I couldn't find the promise to pay notice on the ticket machine so had to pay by card.

Has anyone else had any similar problems? How do you print one on your local machine/Where is the button located?

The machine is one of new ones with the huge screen.

Thanks in advance

 

[island]

You need to go through the motions of buying the ticket you want (or indeed any ticket) and then elect to pay by cash, whereupon you will be offered the option to get a Promise to Pay ticket.

If you were able to pay by card, why were you trying to get a PtP?

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Hopefully someone will be along shortly with an answer to your specific question, but to go off at a bit of a tangent (and with my assurance that this is not meant as a dig at the OP):

I gather that one of the points of the 'promise to pay' (P2P) option not being too easy to find is to stop scallies and other scrotes printing off all the tickets as P2Ps, thus leaving the machine empty of ticket stock and the station full of litter. But isn't a secondary intention to encourage passengers to pay by any means that they do have to hand?

If I have read the OP correctly, the OP wanted to pay by cash: the machine would only take cards, and since the OP couldn't find the P2P option, but did have a card with them, the OP did buy a ticket by card.

I don't see that Northern are in the wrong here: customers are given the option of the P2P, but are strongly encouraged to pay if they can. So if someone really does only have cash (and, importantly, can make sense of how to find the P2P ticket) they can get a P2P and pay later in their journey. But if they do have a means to pay (a card) then they can pay. The fare has been paid when the railway conventionally expects payment - before travel.

 

[323235]

I went past Todmorden the other week and the P2P notice had gone off the screen and only one Penalty Fare notice was in situe.

Other stations on the line were operating as normal with the yellow screen.

 

[Bantamzen]

You need to go through the motions of buying the ticket you want (or indeed any ticket) and then elect to pay by cash, whereupon you will be offered the option to get a Promise to Pay ticket.

If you were able to pay by card, why were you trying to get a PtP?

Exactly this, you select your journey, discount cards etc then at the payment screen select cash and this will produce a P2P. The option was originally a one touch operation but thanks to a number of anti-social types who subsequently emptied the TVMs of tickets this was changed.

 

[Randomer]

I don't see that Northern are in the wrong here: customers are given the option of the P2P, but are strongly encouraged to pay if they can.

My issue with it is that they don't sell the full range of tickets e.g. the various rover tickets available throughout the area Northern serves. So effectively you have to lie in order to get a P2P in order to purchase the ticket you require later in your journey. It wouldn't matter if you could excess a ticket into a rover but there is no mechanism to do this that I can find.

The various fairly good value rover/ranger tickets are quite obscure anyway mainly being PTE products and having them even less available is likely to lead to even fewer sales as people are rightly not comfortable with effectively fooling the machine into issuing a P2P for a journey with a different ticket.

Easily solved with having the tickets shown as a available from the TVM (or even simpler a "I want to purchase a rover/ranger ticket" option) which would then only allow a P2P to be printed. Still requires a process so less likely to be abused by idiots emptying ticket stock out of machines. Unlikely though as I strongly suspect Northern don't like PTE products as they make less profit on them.