Delay Repay Letter

[Madmonk84]

Indeed, if Crosscountry's argument (not very well put forward by them) in every highlighted case is that "the metadata of your picture places you on a train/station at a particular time and we suspect that you used the same ticket to travel at that time as well as claim delay repay for a later service", then maybe a simple resolution (if one did not want to fight the allegation on pure principle that it is absurd) would be to submit evidence of the other ticket actually used for travel when each picture was taken?

There may be well some cases that I am able to do this but I cannot guarantee that I have all available tickets for each scenario as they get swallowed by Barriers/ get disposed of once used as I would have no further use to keep them.

If I am say on holiday for example I purchase tickets using cash as I operate on a set budget so I don’t intentionally overspend.

So unless they’ve got something else up their sleeve which I’m beginning to doubt that they have tbh I should have nothing to worry about.

Dealing with this however is stressful and a burden I don’t particularly need at the moment

 

[Haywain]

I should have nothing to worry about.

As was stated above, this is the sort of statement that leaves us wondering what the reality of the situation is.

 

[simonw]

There may be well some cases that I am able to do this but I cannot guarantee that I have all available tickets for each scenario as they get swallowed by Barriers/ get disposed of once used as I would have no further use to keep them.

If I am say on holiday for example I purchase tickets using cash as I operate on a set budget so I don’t intentionally overspend.

So unless they’ve got something else up their sleeve which I’m beginning to doubt that they have tbh I should have nothing to worry about.

Dealing with this however is stressful and a burden I don’t particularly need at the moment

I'm not doubting they are valid claims, but from your opening sentence why do you photograph some tickets well before using them, yet others (by implication) you appear not to photograph.

Personally, i would only photograph a ticket if I was going to make a claim.

Edit typos

 

[DailyCommuter]

I wonder if XC had other data points which flagged these claims, causing them to review the photos in more detail.

Based on the awarded amounts, these seem to be a full pay out of an Off Peak and First Class Anytime Returns, so would need to be a 2 hour + delay. XC may be worried that some dishonest customers (not suggested this is the case here) will find a significant delay which has happened within the month return validity and claim for that, especially when paper tickets rather than barcodes with usage data are involved. Their suspicion may increase if the DR claims are mostly for return journeys or always for significant delays, rather than a mix.

Taking a photo onboard / en route on a date/time which is neither the outbound journey nor the claimed returned journey may add to that suspicion. Especially as Cardiff Central has barriers, so you might expect the photo to be taken on the way to Cardiff, if the concern was the barrier keeping the ticket. Do Uttoxeter or Totnes have barriers? Taking a photo before the return trip may also add a concern that it could be to avoid any ticket check marks on the ticket.

However, these would be suspicions rather than necessarily proving any wrong doing, but might explain why XC sent the letter in the hope of an explanation, self incrimination or pay out.

 

[SuspectUsual]

We understand that submitting delay pay claims is not always straightforward and that sometimes mistakes are made and errors occur based on the findings of our review. We have found that you’ve submitted delay claims for a total value £2166.60 and received £1229.55 in compensation payments during the period set out above

One other observation - that's a high value of rejected claims even before the current issues

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Reading this thread, this does seem to be a case where the best advice is to discontinue the correspondence.

If the OP has done nothing out of order, then it seems that one option is to let the railway work out for themselves that they (edit: i.e. the railway) have no claim. If on the other hand some of the (edit: OP's) claims are outside the rules, then it's still not worth doing the railway's work of proving them for a court to order repayment.

The hole that this does leave, however, is that it would seem that XC may be reluctant to pay future (legitimate) claims if they have wrongly tagged the OP as trouble.

 

[furlong]

Once they accepted each claim, it's rather too late to wishing they'd made additional checks before paying out!

In several of these cases they ought to have asked for the physical ticket to have been posted to them before accepting the claim.

Some staff would make a point of going through their train ensuring all the tickets had been specifically marked when there was a serious delay. Any tickets submitted for a claim without such a mark were then immediately suspect.

 

[Southern Beau]

Although it does not appear in this case, if a “false claim” is made and the meta data “suggests” the passenger couldn’t have been on the train at the time of the (as they were taking the photo at another location), that could be a reason for XC to question the claim.

 

[SussexMan]

We have found that you’ve submitted delay claims for a total value £2166.60 and received £1229.55 in compensation payments during the period set out above

If I had £2,166.60 of valid claims and yet they only paid out £1,229.55 I'd be chasing them for the missing £937.05. A 56% success rate seems strange. Why did they not pay out 44% of your claim value? And if I regularly took photos of my tickets in case I needed to make a delay repay claim I would certainly be taking pictures of evidence of my delay (e.g. station displays showing the cancelled trains etc). Did you not do that? What percentage is the £2,166.60 (plus any other Delay Repay payments from other TOCs) of your total spend? You can see why they are taking a very close look at your claims.

Tbh I’ve considered settling under protest even though I don’t owe the amount and have done nothing wrong

A very strange response if you have done nothing wrong.

I think I may have a conversation with a solicitor first though to understand my position a little better.

Which will cost a few hundred pounds unless you have access to a friend who is a solicitor.


If you have done nothing wrong, then you need not worry and certainly don't need to be paying £1,300. I think I would be simply replying to deny any allegation and point out how absurd their logic is and telling them you will not be entering into any further correspondence.

If you have actually made a claim for a delayed train which you were not going to take but instead have been trying to obtain cheap travel by identifying delayed trains and claiming on the back of them, then it is up to you whether you pay up or not. If you want there to be absolutely no possibility of some comeback, then paying up will resolve it. Or you engage in no further correspondence and hope they have nothing which really would prove that the claims (or some of them) are fraudulent - unlikely - but you never know.....

 

[Watershed]

If I had £2,166.60 of valid claims and yet they only paid out £1,229.55 I'd be chasing them for the missing £937.05. A 56% success rate seems strange. Why did they not pay out 44% of your claim value? And if I regularly took photos of my tickets in case I needed to make a delay repay claim I would certainly be taking pictures of evidence of my delay (e.g. station displays showing the cancelled trains etc). Did you not do that? What percentage is the £2,166.60 (plus any other Delay Repay payments from other TOCs) of your total spend? You can see why they are taking a very close look at your claims.

It's possible this is all a misunderstanding of what that value means, to be honest. It seems entirely plausible that £2,166 is just the face value of the tickets on which the claims were made, and that £1,229 is the amount of compensation received because it was a mixture of 25, 50 and 100% Delay Repay - depending on the length of delay in each instance.

 

[simonw]

It's possible this is all a misunderstanding of what that value means, to be honest. It seems entirely plausible that £2,166 is just the face value of the tickets on which the claims were made, and that £1,229 is the amount of compensation received because it was a mixture of 25, 50 and 100% Delay Repay - depending on the length of delay in each instance.

The letter says submitted claims to the value of... Doesn't seem much room for misunderstanding imho.

 

[cornishjohn]

The letter says submitted claims to the value of... Doesn't seem much room for misunderstanding imho.

Sometimes the TOC may disagree on the duration of the delay. this worked in my favour on a regular route of mine where for some reason my destination station would frequently be logged as "no report" and I always got 2 hours delay awarded regardless what I claimed. So claims by OP of 1 hour but paid for 30 minutes is not necessarily impossible.

But shirley the TOC should be deciding against any metadata before making any award, not changing their mind afterwards?

Curious however that although our OP takes photos of everything incase they are delayed, they might not in fact have photos of everything after all....