This is long, sorry.
I made a delay repay claim with Southeastern back in June, and am now bashing my head against a brick wall trying to get them to pay what I think they should. I'd like to know
(a) if there's any merit to my claim, and
(b) if there is merit, is there any way I can contact the people who deal with delay repay directly, rather than keep contacting generic customer service people who will "add a note to the claim and pass it back to the team" (there are two tickets involved which means this is two separate claims (one of which got denied, to complicate everything even further), and I don't want to have this argument twice if I don't have to).
In June, my mother and I got the train from Strood to St. Pancras Intl. At Ebbsfleet Intl, the train was terminated due to an issue with the train, so we had to change trains to continue to St. Pancras.
Their timeline:
"your scheduled service departed 2 minutes late at Strood (Kent) at 11:37.
This service terminated at Ebbsfleet International at 11:52.
The next working service from Ebbsfleet International departed at 12:04.
This service then arrived at your destination of London St Pancras International at 12:23, 15 minutes later than your scheduled arrival of 12:08"
My argument is that
(1) We arrived at Ebbsfleet at 11:52, but weren't told immediately that the service was terminating. It took a couple of minutes for the driver to decide that the problem wasn't fixable.
(2) My mother is elderly, has mobility problems, and is currently undergoing immunotherapy. This means she requires a lift (which happened to be at the other end of the platform from where we were sat on the train). After queueing for the lift, we got down to the barriers at 12:03, which didn't leave enough time to get to the 12:04 train (which was listed on the board as departing at 12:03).
(3) We arrived at Ebbsfleet on platform 5. The trains that we could get instead go from platform 2. Switching from platform 5 to platform 2 involves going down from platform 5, through an underpass, changing buildings (either via quite a few stairs, or quite a long ramp), walking past the ticket office and Eurostar platforms, and going down to platform 2. An able-bodied person could do this in 10 minutes, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone who's disabled to do so.
The next train to St. Pancras was the 12:20 (cancelled, due to our initial train blocking the platform), then the 12:35, which we got, resulting in a delay of about 40 minutes. We didn't purposefully choose to not get the 12:04; as I said above, having to walk the whole platform to get to the lift, wait for the lift, and use the lift took almost 10 minutes, and going from the barriers at platform 5 to platform 2 took almost as long again.
Is there any chance I'm going to convince Southeastern to change the delay time from the 15-29 minute category to the 30-59 minute category, or are they just going to stubbornly insist that because a train did depart at 12:04, and an able-bodied person could have made it across the station to catch it, that's the one they're going to base their timings off of, despite it not being feasible for us to get that train (and actually, probably would have been dangerous if we'd tried to rush to get it)?
The cherry on top is that when I went to claim delay repay, I was pleased to see that they now allow you to claim for multiple tickets in one claim, which I did (the ticket I used, and the ticket my mother used). What they don't tell you is that if you ask for the compensation for both to be paid to the same person, they'll deny one of them because one person can't use two tickets (and clearly no-one would ever buy a ticket for a friend/relative). So one of the claims got denied. I was hoping that I would be able to address both issues at once, but no, I've not had any more contact about the denied claim. So I'm not very impressed with Southeastern right now.
I made a delay repay claim with Southeastern back in June, and am now bashing my head against a brick wall trying to get them to pay what I think they should. I'd like to know
(a) if there's any merit to my claim, and
(b) if there is merit, is there any way I can contact the people who deal with delay repay directly, rather than keep contacting generic customer service people who will "add a note to the claim and pass it back to the team" (there are two tickets involved which means this is two separate claims (one of which got denied, to complicate everything even further), and I don't want to have this argument twice if I don't have to).
In June, my mother and I got the train from Strood to St. Pancras Intl. At Ebbsfleet Intl, the train was terminated due to an issue with the train, so we had to change trains to continue to St. Pancras.
Their timeline:
"your scheduled service departed 2 minutes late at Strood (Kent) at 11:37.
This service terminated at Ebbsfleet International at 11:52.
The next working service from Ebbsfleet International departed at 12:04.
This service then arrived at your destination of London St Pancras International at 12:23, 15 minutes later than your scheduled arrival of 12:08"
My argument is that
(1) We arrived at Ebbsfleet at 11:52, but weren't told immediately that the service was terminating. It took a couple of minutes for the driver to decide that the problem wasn't fixable.
(2) My mother is elderly, has mobility problems, and is currently undergoing immunotherapy. This means she requires a lift (which happened to be at the other end of the platform from where we were sat on the train). After queueing for the lift, we got down to the barriers at 12:03, which didn't leave enough time to get to the 12:04 train (which was listed on the board as departing at 12:03).
(3) We arrived at Ebbsfleet on platform 5. The trains that we could get instead go from platform 2. Switching from platform 5 to platform 2 involves going down from platform 5, through an underpass, changing buildings (either via quite a few stairs, or quite a long ramp), walking past the ticket office and Eurostar platforms, and going down to platform 2. An able-bodied person could do this in 10 minutes, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone who's disabled to do so.
The next train to St. Pancras was the 12:20 (cancelled, due to our initial train blocking the platform), then the 12:35, which we got, resulting in a delay of about 40 minutes. We didn't purposefully choose to not get the 12:04; as I said above, having to walk the whole platform to get to the lift, wait for the lift, and use the lift took almost 10 minutes, and going from the barriers at platform 5 to platform 2 took almost as long again.
Is there any chance I'm going to convince Southeastern to change the delay time from the 15-29 minute category to the 30-59 minute category, or are they just going to stubbornly insist that because a train did depart at 12:04, and an able-bodied person could have made it across the station to catch it, that's the one they're going to base their timings off of, despite it not being feasible for us to get that train (and actually, probably would have been dangerous if we'd tried to rush to get it)?
The cherry on top is that when I went to claim delay repay, I was pleased to see that they now allow you to claim for multiple tickets in one claim, which I did (the ticket I used, and the ticket my mother used). What they don't tell you is that if you ask for the compensation for both to be paid to the same person, they'll deny one of them because one person can't use two tickets (and clearly no-one would ever buy a ticket for a friend/relative). So one of the claims got denied. I was hoping that I would be able to address both issues at once, but no, I've not had any more contact about the denied claim. So I'm not very impressed with Southeastern right now.
