No i didnt get a ticket , i asked for a day ticket.
As i asked for a day ticket i was expecting one. If i just presented my bank card and tapped. then that would indicate i would tap and cap.
I remember that day using 15 out to Penicuik , then 40 from Penicuik , East Coast service , so i got charged a ticket and recieved a paper one.
As it hasn't already been posted here, the full range of area-valid tickets can now be bought by contactless on all 'city' buses/services. So for example you could purchase one adult single, one child day ticket and a network rider all in the same transaction on any Lothian bus. In addition to the tap, tap cap thing.
I think the point being made is that things have moved on (the 15 and 140 haven't run to Penicuik for ages, so your experience may not have been very recent). From what I recall, last year the company said they were hoping to introduce a 'vending mode' so that you could buy paper day tickets using contactless cards without subscribing to the capping scheme. This resolves criticisms about group tickets and paying fares for others with one card.
However it doesn't help when you've started to use capping then find you need to use an East Coast service. I suppose it's no different to the case when you have to use another operator altogether but one of the selling points of East Coast is acceptance of the Lothian tickets. So it's good to hear they're trying to resolve this too.
Obviously different operators so different system but in Aberdeen the way it works is your first journey is charged at £2.70 (3+ Stages single), with your second journey at £1.70 (1-2 Stages Single) this comes to a total of £4.40 which is equal to the price of a day ticket, any further journeys are free.
I'm not really sure how Tap+Cap could work on longer distance / rural routes with multiple fare rates depending on distance, so it'll be interesting to see what they do for ECB. Imo the technology only really works if you have two or less fare rates.
At the moment on services with only two zones available (like airport buses or LCB route 43) you need to tell the driver where you're going and you receive a paper ticket for the single journey but capping still applies, calculated using start and finish points for each journey over the day. You don't tap out though, just trusted to get off when you said, in the absence of anyone inspecting your paper ticket. Hopefully this can be extended to multiple zones and that's what they're working on. I suppose a downside is that everyone needs to negotiate with the driver so some of the loading speed advantage is lost with multiple zone services.