Weekly Season - not travelling- no recourse?

[amsutcliffe]

I currently hold a weekly season ticket expiring tomorrow. I had planned to use it today and tomorrow but am following the sensible advice to not travel rather than risk the almost inevitable significant disruption and delay.

My understanding is that I cannot claim delay repay or any form of refund or extension of validly to travel later in the week. Is that correct?

It is slightly frustrating that it seems almost every other type of ticket - be that a ticket for a single journey or a different type of season ticket - offers some compensation or flexibility but weekly seasons lose out. Is there any particular rationale for this approach?

 

[Haywain]

My understanding is that I cannot claim delay repay or any form of refund or extension of validly to travel later in the week. Is that correct?

Have you contacted the train operator about this? If not, that would be the best approach.

 

[30907]

Depending on your journey, a typical weekly season is priced around 4 times the cost of anytime fares (sometimes much less) and assumes that people will use it 5 times out of 7. It is still valid for travel even though the advice is not to, hence the general policy of no extensions on seasons.

 

[m00036]

Although there is no specific provision for delay repay in the details provided, if at least one service you might have taken was delayed by at least one minute, you would be entitled to a refund on your ticket anyway if you chose not to travel. This applies based on the timetable when you bought your weekly season, so any cancellations after the date of purchase would also give you that entitlement. The entitlement appears to be 2/5 of the total price paid. If every single service ran perfectly to time (around when you would normally have travelled, in both directions), then I would be grateful for having such a reliable service

Reference: Paragraph 30 of NRCoT

Depending on the operator you are travelling with, validity may well extend to Wednesday and Thursday as an alternative to claiming compensation.

 

[AlterEgo]

Although there is no specific provision for delay repay in the details provided, if at least one service you might have taken was delayed by at least one minute, you would be entitled to a refund on your ticket anyway if you chose not to travel.

If you stay at home and don’t travel you don’t get to claim delay repay, unless you are otherwise invited to claim by the operator.

Claiming for trains you weren’t on to claim a sum you know not to be due to you is fraud.

 

[m00036]

I think you're misunderstanding me; I'm not talking about delay repay, I'm talking about a refund. Presumably the passenger with the weekly season ticket had plans for today and tomorrow before the weather, so if those trains subsequently didn't run, the passenger would be entirely entitled to a refund. I would suggest that the weather warning saying 'do not travel' is more argument in the passenger's favour as opposed to casting doubt on whether the passenger intended to travel.

 

[lyesbkz]

If you stay at home and don’t travel you don’t get to claim delay repay, unless you are otherwise invited to claim by the operator.

Claiming for trains you weren’t on to claim a sum you know not to be due to you is fraud.

On this particular occasion there is a message on the disruption page on nationalrail.co.uk inviting season ticket holders, except weekly, to claim Delay Repay if they don't travel.

Season Ticket holders (monthly or longer only) who do not travel, can claim 100% compensation through Delay Repay for the hot weather dates, 18 and 19 July.

I suppose this is the reason for the original query as to why weekly seasons are excluded. Actually working out how to claim the Delay Repay, and from whom to claim when you haven't travelled, is another story.

 

[Starmill]

If you heed advice not to travel, you'll always be entitled to something back, certainly if the difference between what you paid for and what you used is a positive number, and often when it isn't. In this case it's likely to be via the delay repay scheme, albeit you never travelled. It is advisable to have a quick check with whomever you were to travel with.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 19 Jul 2022 ==

Depending on your journey, a typical weekly season is priced around 4 times the cost of anytime fares (sometimes much less) and assumes that people will use it 5 times out of 7. It is still valid for travel even though the advice is not to, hence the general policy of no extensions on seasons.

I'm not really sure what you mean here? The general policy is to offer pro-rated cash refunds, not extensions on seasons. Extensions on seasons used to be common under the old charter compensation schemes but are now rare. A cash refund is slightly simpler, and the entitlement to this is clearer.

 

[Haywain]

Extensions on seasons used to be common under the old charter compensation schemes but are now rare.

Except they were extensions on the next season rather than the current one and it didn’t apply to weekly seasons.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

It might be worth noting that NRE currently says at https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service_disruptions/300802.aspx

Weekly Season Ticket holders

• If your services are suspended and you are unable to use your ticket because there is no service running on the line covered by your Season Ticket then you will be able to claim 100% pro-rata refund of the cost of your ticket.

No mechanism stated for claiming your refund, and no definition of pro-rata (so presumably 1/7 per day rather than the 1/5 for how most people use a weekly season) but at least the idea seems to be there.

 

[ainsworth74]

I haven't had to make a claim myself for this period but in previous occasions when a "Do Not Travel" has been issued and I've been using a weekly season that I couldn't use on day due to that instruction I've emailed Northern and they've sent me the daily rate as compensation. The calculation, as I recall, was the value divided by ten (as they assume ten journeys per week) times by two (for the a return journey).

 

[Starmill]

It might be worth noting that NRE currently says at https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service_disruptions/300802.aspx




No mechanism stated for claiming your refund, and no definition of pro-rata (so presumably 1/7 per day rather than the 1/5 for how most people use a weekly season) but at least the idea seems to be there.

The other really confusing thing there is that it specifies "because there is no service running on the line covered by your season ticket". While it's fairly obvious that if there is indeed literally no service, then there would be an entitlement to a refund, if advice not to travel has been issued then it's quite irrelevant what service does or doesn't run! If you're not travelling because you've been asked not to by the train operator, you're entitled to the refund.