Buying gold card for temporary use

[Be3G]

Hi all,

Long while since I've posted here but still lurk from time to time (and use tickets.railforums.co.uk on occasions when buying in advance) so haven't forgotten about this place. Hoping for a bit of guidance/reassurance please!

I will shortly be travelling in to central London from the suburbs approx. five days per week for eight weeks. The journeys will be on all different days of the week, and with the 4–7pm inbound off-peak concession, they will all count as off-peak journeys. Some days it might just be a Z5–Z1 and Z1–Z5 London Overground journey, other days it could be a Z3–1 cap (using buses the rest of the way), and on some occasions it could be with enough travel for a Z5–1 cap.

So I've been thinking about how to bring down the cost of doing this, and the sums suggest my best option is to buy the cheapest annual season (still Hatton <-> Lapworth?), get the gold card discount loaded on to an Oyster, use it for the two months, then request a refund for the annual ticket. Factoring in the refund calculation based on the monthly season price, plus a £10 admin fee, that would ultimately cost about £50 which is worthwhile for a £2–£5 daily saving.

However, doing this feels somehow… I don't know, wrong I suppose, like I'm cheating a bit. So I just wanted to check there's nothing obvious I've missed that would prevent the above from being feasible?

One complication that has occurred to me is I would need to get the discount on my Oyster removed after I've returned the annual season ticket. I recall sometimes having problems getting London Underground staff to correctly add railcard discounts in years gone by, so is it even possible for them to remove a discount? If not, are any National Rail ticket offices able to do this? (London Overground? The much-respected Marylebone?)

Also… every year I tend to buy either a Network or a Two-Together Railcard (or sometimes even both); currently I don't have either. It would be tempting to buy a £10 railcard whilst I'm in possession of the annual gold card. Again, is this acceptable? Or put another way, would using the £10 offer do anything to restrict or reduce my eligibility for a refund on the annual gold card?

If there were an Oyster-loadable railcard covering a substantial portion of the country that I could buy for, say, £100/year I would probably just do that without any of the complications of the above. But no such thing exists…

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Hi all,

Long while since I've posted here but still lurk from time to time (and use tickets.railforums.co.uk on occasions when buying in advance) so haven't forgotten about this place. Hoping for a bit of guidance/reassurance please!

I will shortly be travelling in to central London from the suburbs approx. five days per week for eight weeks. The journeys will be on all different days of the week, and with the 4–7pm inbound off-peak concession, they will all count as off-peak journeys. Some days it might just be a Z5–Z1 and Z1–Z5 London Overground journey, other days it could be a Z3–1 cap (using buses the rest of the way), and on some occasions it could be with enough travel for a Z5–1 cap.

So I've been thinking about how to bring down the cost of doing this, and the sums suggest my best option is to buy the cheapest annual season (still Hatton <-> Lapworth?), get the gold card discount loaded on to an Oyster, use it for the two months, then request a refund for the annual ticket. Factoring in the refund calculation based on the monthly season price, plus a £10 admin fee, that would ultimately cost about £50 which is worthwhile for a £2–£5 daily saving.

However, doing this feels somehow… I don't know, wrong I suppose, like I'm cheating a bit. So I just wanted to check there's nothing obvious I've missed that would prevent the above from being feasible?

One complication that has occurred to me is I would need to get the discount on my Oyster removed after I've returned the annual season ticket. I recall sometimes having problems getting London Underground staff to correctly add railcard discounts in years gone by, so is it even possible for them to remove a discount? If not, are any National Rail ticket offices able to do this? (London Overground? The much-respected Marylebone?)

Also… every year I tend to buy either a Network or a Two-Together Railcard (or sometimes even both); currently I don't have either. It would be tempting to buy a £10 railcard whilst I'm in possession of the annual gold card. Again, is this acceptable? Or put another way, would using the £10 offer do anything to restrict or reduce my eligibility for a refund on the annual gold card?

If there were an Oyster-loadable railcard covering a substantial portion of the country that I could buy for, say, £100/year I would probably just do that without any of the complications of the above. But no such thing exists…

I'm no expert on these issues - but while it would generate a cash saving (on your figures: you're doing this for five days a week for 8 weeks, that's 40 days, so a minimum saving of 40 days x £2 = £80, through to a maximum of 40 days x £5 = £200: in both cases less £50 to implement the scheme, so a cash saving of £30 - £150) would the amount of hassle you would have to do all this be worth it?

Otherwise, I'd suggest that if you're worried about the difficulty of getting entitlement taken off an Oyster Card when you refund the gold card, then get an extra Oyster card for £7: use it only when in your scheme and then lock it away in a drawer.

 

[Be3G]

Thanks for your reply. If the hassle basically amounts to:

1. Going to a ticket office to buy a ticket
2. Having £200 less in my bank account for two months
3. Going to a ticket office to refund the ticket

…and it saves, say, £100 in travel costs after deductions, then to me it's worth it. It'd be a bit like putting the £200 in a two-month bank bond with a 600% annual interest rate! Granted, if the saving only ends up being £30 then it probably wouldn't be worth the faff – but I do expect it to be more than that. (And there's the potential £20 off another railcard too.)

Yes your second paragraph echoes a thought I had re. Oyster discount removal. If they still implemented refundable deposits I'd just hand it back but alas they don't. I don't really want/need a second Oyster either, so my preference would be to get the discount removed, but your idea is my backup plan.

 

[Hadders]

I can’t see any reason why you cannot do this.

Regarding the removal of the discount from the Oyster card, just lock the card away until the discount expires then it’s ok to use it again. In the meantime just use contactless for any ad-hoc travel which is the same price.

 

[Haywain]

doing this feels somehow… I don't know, wrong I suppose, like I'm cheating a bit.

Well, it is like cheating a bit, but not so far as you are actually breaking any rules or laws. You are just taking advantage of what could be viewed as a flaw in the system.

 

[trek]

Yes your second paragraph echoes a thought I had re. Oyster discount removal. If they still implemented refundable deposits I'd just hand it back but alas they don't. I don't really want/need a second Oyster either, so my preference would be to get the discount removed, but your idea is my backup plan.

It's absolutely possible for them to do it, I've had it done before. They just need to log in to the interface, hit the discount, change the discount row to a blank one, and ideally remove the "railcard/photocard" number as well. It's pretty much the opposite of what they do when putting it on - I'd try somewhere a bit larger like Baker Street if you have issues at Marylebone. You could also try one of the pink visitor information centres eg at Kings Cross St Pancras or Liverpool Street.

National Rail ticket offices can't do it anymore - some of the outer Elizabeth Line stations can (but they will take you to a TVM to do it) but they are no better trained than LU staff in all honesty (and you may be reliant on specific staff being avaliable).

 

[Be3G]

Thanks, trek, for confirming the operation is technically feasible. That's a good thought about trying a visitor's centre; I think the last time I used one of those was a long time ago when they were one of the few (only?) places to buy the now-defunct odd-period bus passes!

Incidentally a general point for anyone reading this thread in future: savings might not be as much as expected after all. Something I hadn't realised until I examined MikeWh's site in detail to check was that Oyster back-office processing doesn't occur with railcard-discounted Oyster cards – only full-rate adult ones. The rather simplistic capping algorithm on Oyster compared to contactless can therefore in certain situations make the saving much less than 33%.

For example, one day I made a zone 5–1 journey, three chargeable bus journeys, and a zone 1–2 journey. On my railcard-discounted Oyster I paid £9.35, which was the total cost of each individual journey because the cap in operation was for zones 1–5. Whereas with contactless it would have been only a little more at £10.70 for a zone 1–2 cap plus 3–5 extension.

Still, I'm certain I will have saved money overall once this is over, but maybe the value-effort proposition will have diminished.