£10 for train refund

osborn99

I had to cancel my off-peak journey for £21.9. Cost me £10 for the pleasure. On the Virgin site once you click refund you get an email straight away saying the money has been sent to your account. No human beings are involved apart from maybe pushing a button.

Can someone give me a breakdown what the actual cost is?

I believe it's close to £0

wealdroam

Just because no human was involved in your particular transaction, how do you imagine all that automatic process was achieved without human intervention?

And the technology costs a few pence too.

In future maybe consider buying you tickets from Southern Railway and take advantage of their Money Back Guarantee.

skivenov

Thanks for that - I'll be using them in the future

Hasbeen

osborn99 wrote: »

I had to cancel my off-peak journey for £21.9. Cost me £10 for the pleasure. On the Virgin site once you click refund you get an email straight away saying the money has been sent to your account. No human beings are involved apart from maybe pushing a button.

Can someone give me a breakdown what the actual cost is?

I believe it's close to £0

Err! Perhaps not entirely true?

Cost of numerous software engineers, to programme equipment.

Cost of manufacturing, said equipment,

Cost of maintaining said equipment,

Etc, Etc, Etc and so on!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also cost of putting in said conditions, that some human beings are seemingly incable of reading and understanding?:)

TimothyEBaldwin

The major cost is from misleading the railway as to how busy the train will be.

Livingthedream

Virgin Trains have to make all the profit they can at the moment, as they'll be out of business come Xmas, so all those £10 admin fees help.

laird

The £10 fee is an interesting one, trainline (the company that actually is selling the ticket via the virgin trains branded site) claim it is set by the Association of Train Operating Companies.

Interestingly as they are not a train operator they are not a member so are not bound to follow what another group does?

Fees are supposed to reflect the cost of performing that action, the £10 maximum fee set by ATOC covers its face to face sellers at the railway station so to me it seems strange that Trainline need to charge the same when they have a much lower cost base using outsourced Indian call centres and had to provide the refund system as part of their core business when selling rail ticket so the ongoing software support costs should be less (the Rail stations have the same software requirements)?

The answer would be to shop around maybe the ATOS backed rail operator websites charge differently?

Hasbeen

laird wrote: »

The £10 fee is an interesting one, trainline (the company that actually is selling the ticket via the virgin trains branded site) claim it is set by the Association of Train Operating Companies.

Interestingly as they are not a train operator they are not a member so are not bound to follow what another group does?

Fees are supposed to reflect the cost of performing that action, the £10 maximum fee set by ATOC covers its face to face sellers at the railway station so to me it seems strange that Trainline need to charge the same when they have a much lower cost base using outsourced Indian call centres and had to provide the refund system as part of their core business when selling rail ticket so the ongoing software support costs should be less (the Rail stations have the same software requirements)?

The answer would be to shop around maybe the ATOS backed rail operator websites charge differently?

I thought that trainline like some others, just bought the tickets from the train company perhaps at discount and then added on their own fee. So if ticket was then cancelled /refunded they would still have to pay the train companys admin costs?????

laird

No they are just another travel agent so they get about 7% commission (maybe more given their scale) for each sale.
Only a small proportion of tickets would ever be asked for a refund so the commission rate is supposed to cover all the business costs.

Anybody can apply to be a ticket seller (think travel agent), details are on the ATOC website.