Is there any eligibility for a refund/delay repay if your service is changed prior to departure?

[js517]

Yet it is often (not always of course) very easy to contact passengers that have bought online to tell them the time table has changed. Very very few retailers do this, and some of those that do implement it poorly despite it being fairly simple to do because there are no negative effects for them.

It isn't quite as simple as you might think. TOCs add and remove trains from the timetable very frequently. Services.can be removed by mistake, and the same train will be readded sometime later. A service with one ID can be replaced with one with another ID - you need to check that it matches the customer's itinerary. The service origin and or destination may have changed but this might not impact the customer.

Once you've established that a customer's itinerary is affected then you have to decide:
How badly affected does it have to be before you contact them?
Do you contact them again if it gets more broken?
Do you contact them again if it gets fixed, or partially fixed?
How close to departure is it worth emailing them?
What do you advise the customer? You might be able to generate an alternative itinerary that is valid for the ticket(s) that they hold if you have a journey planner that supports it. A customer holding a TOC specific ticket might need to rely on local arrangements / disgression to avoid a very long wait.

As to whether there are negative affects to the retailer - its a scenario where they can't really win. If the retailer informs the customer, the customer may blame the retailer despite it being out of their control. If the retailer doesn't inform the customer, the customer blames the retailer for not informing them.

 

[Watershed]

It isn't quite as simple as you might think. TOCs add and remove trains from the timetable very frequently. Services.can be removed by mistake, and the same train will be readded sometime later. A service with one ID can be replaced with one with another ID - you need to check that it matches the customer's itinerary. The service origin and or destination may have changed but this might not impact the customer.

Once you've established that a customer's itinerary is affected then you have to decide:
How badly affected does it have to be before you contact them?
Do you contact them again if it gets more broken?
Do you contact them again if it gets fixed, or partially fixed?
How close to departure is it worth emailing them?
What do you advise the customer? You might be able to generate an alternative itinerary that is valid for the ticket(s) that they hold if you have a journey planner that supports it. A customer holding a TOC specific ticket might need to rely on local arrangements / disgression to avoid a very long wait.

As to whether there are negative affects to the retailer - its a scenario where they can't really win. If the retailer informs the customer, the customer may blame the retailer despite it being out of their control. If the retailer doesn't inform the customer, the customer blames the retailer for not informing them.

And so the solution is just to say nothing at all, despite being aware that there is a change...?

 

[js517]

And so the solution is just to say nothing at all, despite being aware that there is a change...?

That's not what I'm suggesting, no. Some retailers do inform the customer when their itinerary is broken. I'm merely pointing out that it isn't as simple to get right as some might believe. The retailer can put in a lot of effort, and still get all the blame despite it being the fault of a TOC.

I'd rather see stronger passenger rights that would make this simpler (from a retailer and customer perspective) to handle. i.e if a valid itinerary becomes broken, all operator and route restrictions of tickets are ignored. Sadly the NRCoT doesn't allow for this.

 

[robbeech]

I think most passengers would sooner know about a change as many would be able to accommodate it meaning they wouldn’t need to exercise their rights in the first place, but I agree they should be in place.

I also agree that it’s perhaps not as easy as it may seem to do so but it is possible to do without too much effort.

An example.

a passenger has a booked itinerary on a single train. They book 6 weeks in advance. 2 weeks later they change the timetable to put in a diversion, as such it leaves their origin 14 minutes earlier and arrives at their destination at the same time. The system knows about this and can email them a basic message saying as much or as little of this information as necessary. For this type of change there is no reason why the email can’t give the full info, the new itinerary and a link to refund or change the ticket should it not be suitable.

For more complicated changes it may just be a case of saying “the timetable may have changed, please check your train times” and again link to refunds / alterations etc. You’d look to limit it to once every day to avoid nuisance emails, give the passenger the opportunity to unsubscribe, or make it opt in in the first place, and the only filter that would be required would be the origin and destination times of each train. So a change of starting point wouldn’t trigger an email.

All in all it is still fairly straightforward in theory, but as I say, there’s no incentive to do it.

 

[alistairlees]

There is plenty of incentive to do it. Edge cases can be very hard to manage well though.

 

[SickyNicky]

An example.

a passenger has a booked itinerary on a single train. They book 6 weeks in advance. 2 weeks later they change the timetable to put in a diversion, as such it leaves their origin 14 minutes earlier and arrives at their destination at the same time. The system knows about this and can email them a basic message saying as much or as little of this information as necessary. For this type of change there is no reason why the email can’t give the full info, the new itinerary and a link to refund or change the ticket should it not be suitable.

This is an interesting example that leads to a number of questions.

• The retimed train leaves their origin earlier than booked. This means that the customer turns up with a ticket that's apparently for a later train. Will he even be allowed on the earlier one? I'm not sure, but I doubt it, even armed with an email from the retailer.
• If the newly retimed train is allocated a different ID compared to the old train (it happens all the time) there's no way to connect the old train to the new one. So it will appear to be a cancellation (not a retiming) from the perspective of the TIS. So the customer will be told their train has been cancelled.
• If the Retail Service ID (RSID) has also changed, their seat reservations might not be there either. Yes, RSIDs do change.
• You can't just change the ticket for use on a different service, as the quota from which it came is likely to be used up and the price higher. The original ticket must be used if you don't want to pay more. That makes things like seat reservations quite hard and inevitably causes issues with station staff (who often claim the ticket isn't valid because it was issued for a train that doesn't exist). I'd love to see an industry process to allow advances to be moved seamlessly to another train in the event of disruption, but that doesn't exist at the moment.
• Obviously refunds are possible in these circumstances. Good retailers are already doing this with self-service portals that allow for an instant refund (unless you have already printed ToD tickets, which complicates matters).

In essence, it's really hard! You want to tell the customer there's going to be a problem, but you can't do much more than that. They can then either refund the tickets or attempt to travel anyway and rely on staff (who may know nothing about the retiming) to tell them what to do.

 

[robbeech]

I understand the difficulties and complications (or rather, I understand that there are difficulties and complications) and now (Thankyou @SickyNicky and @js517 ) have further understanding of what might prevent any useful information being given.

That said, I think most passengers would still prefer to be contacted to say “something has changed, you had better check” than turn up to find they can’t actually get there in time for work or can no longer make a connection to get home. It shouldn’t reduce the Railway’s responsibility to put things right, but it should minimise the necessity for them to need to do so as most people will cooperate as their primary goal is to get from A to B.

It’s only sad folk here that would deliberately turn up for a train knowing it had already gone and then demand a taxi / hotel. And thankfully it’s small numbers.

I agree with it being handled poorly. I’ve held an advance ticket for an XC service before where the timetable has changed between purchase and travel. I looked through the timetable and realised it was travelling earlier so I turned up at the station earlier and confirmed with station staff and explained the issue. They agreed and I got on the train. I found my seat reservation (because it was the right train) and sat in it.

The guard rejected my ticket because I was on the ‘wrong train’. Despite my train at the time on the ticket not existing, despite the same id number, despite my seat reservation being my origin and destination, despite me presenting them with a clear understanding, it was still rejected. I was made to pay for an SOS which was in excess of £100, something a lot of people would understandably not be able to afford.

I asked them what would have happened if I’d taken the next train. They said the ticket wouldn’t be valid on there either. Their suggestion was if the train isn’t running (and isn’t cancelled on the day) and I have an advance for it then my ticket is void and I MUST refund it and buy one for the right train. They were of course “doing me a favour” by not referring me for prosecution.

I did get it refunded although it took a senior member of the team to understand it, but most people wouldn’t have understood enough or would have taken the CS staff’s word for it and would have been left with a (I think) £24 ticket they used and a >£100 ticket they had to buy.

To this day I don’t know if the guard was just poorly trained or whether they wanted the commission from a >£100 SOS knowing full well that if the ticket gets refunded it is NOT deducted from their commission. Their attitude makes me lean heavily towards the latter although I cannot rule out both.

Overall in every single situation like this it is ALWAYS the passenger that loses out be that in lost time, or lost money, or both.

 

[js517]

Even in your case which is really quite simple , the NRCoT is lacking. I think you have to rely on condition 28.2. There isn't an automatic right to travel on an earlier service; even if it means you're going to miss onward connections.