Delay Repay - CrossCountry & Evidence

[Watershed]

Indeed. The NRCoT say you "may" make a journey using multiple tickets. There is nothing to say that if you buy split tickets you are compelled to consider them as one journey.

 

[blimmo]

Are XC interpreting their passenger charter as

Either the original ticket, or (in the case of Season tickets a photocopy of the ticket and your photocard, your booking confirmation e-mail, or your unique journey number.)

I.e. the booking confirmation option only being available for season tickets.

I'm not claiming this makes any sense only that I think it is almost a valid reading of the sentence and therefore could be the basis for the refusals.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Are XC interpreting their passenger charter as

Either the original ticket, or (in the case of Season tickets a photocopy of the ticket and your photocard, your booking confirmation e-mail, or your unique journey number.)

I.e. the booking confirmation option only being available for season tickets.

I'm not claiming this makes any sense only that I think it is almost a valid reading of the sentence and therefore could be the basis for the refusals.

This can't possibly be right. As a matter of how English is written, if the brackets are taken as defining an alternative then if you remove everything in the brackets, you are left with

Either the original ticket, or

Which makes no sense - you can't have 'either x or null'.

And if you don't like that argument, what's a 'unique journey number' for a season ticket?

It's much more likely that the closing bracket has been misplaced and should be be between 'tickets' and 'a'. It would also read more easily if the documents acceptable for any ticket were listed and the those also accepted for season tickets.

 

[tutacre]

To my knowledge there is no requirement for the ticketed itinerary to be the same as the actual journey.

I did not say there was - I simply said what the fraud rules look for. It is entirely up to a train operator what they wish to manually review prior to making a payment to a claimant. If the automated system thinks there are tickets held that have not been disclosed, perfectly reasonable to send it to a manual queue, or have the logic check eTVD barcode scans to see whether the full combination was used.

I am pretty sure you all know full well what the scam here is in any event, which for XC, given the high number of split tickets these days, is quite an issue.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Yesterday at 09:59 ==

Indeed. The NRCoT say you "may" make a journey using multiple tickets. There is nothing to say that if you buy split tickets you are compelled to consider them as one journey.

The issue is that people are buying and using split tickets - all of them - but conveniently hiding some of them if their overall journey doesn't qualify (e.g. the train recovers time later). Your scenario is extremely niche, not many "normal" passengers are buying multiple tickets simply never to use them or discarding them. If people don't use them because they've abandoned their journey midway through, that is a refund situation not DR.

 

[blimmo]

I did not say there was - I simply said what the fraud rules look for. It is entirely up to a train operator what they wish to manually review prior to making a payment to a claimant. If the automated system thinks there are tickets held that have not been disclosed, perfectly reasonable to send it to a manual queue, or have the logic check eTVD barcode scans to see whether the full combination was used.

I am pretty sure you all know full well what the scam here is in any event, which for XC, given the high number of split tickets these days, is quite an issue.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Yesterday at 09:59 ==


The issue is that people are buying and using split tickets - all of them - but conveniently hiding some of them if their overall journey doesn't qualify (e.g. the train recovers time later). Your scenario is extremely niche, not many "normal" passengers are buying multiple tickets simply never to use them or discarding them. If people don't use them because they've abandoned their journey midway through, that is a refund situation not DR.

Since you are allowed to claim delay repay on a journey where you end short on your ticket, surely the existence or otherwise of additional tickets is pretty irrelevant?

I.e. if I have a Coventry to Birmingham ticket and claim DR30 but also have a bham to Wolverhampton ticket as well, this is effectively the same situation as having a Coventry to Wolverhampton ticket and claiming the Coventry to Birmingham delay. Sure look for scans or whatever but DR is just fundamentally a trust based system.

I have actually had a manual review of a claim where I used the last part of a ticket's validity to complete a longer journey that was delayed. There was absolutely no way for Avanti to verify my story and obviously they didn't believe me (since the longer ticket was much more expensive than the shorter one that would've been necessary) but the review basically just relented immediately since it was clear there was no way to disprove my story.

I always thought the limit on delay repay of the value of the ticket was the ultimate defence to this sort of fraud.

 

[Watershed]

The issue is that people are buying and using split tickets - all of them - but conveniently hiding some of them if their overall journey doesn't qualify (e.g. the train recovers time later). Your scenario is extremely niche, not many "normal" passengers are buying multiple tickets simply never to use them or discarding them. If people don't use them because they've abandoned their journey midway through, that is a refund situation not DR.

Claimants are free to define their journey as they wish, that's the point I'm making. There is nothing in the NRCoT that says you are automatically considered to be making one journey if you use multiple tickets on the same train. It is up to the passenger to choose if they want to rely on section 14 or not.