South West Trains Refund

Dashimus

Hello,

Just got compensation through for South West Trains on my season ticket. £136. However, my circumstances are a little different and despite asking a question on here a year ago, I didn't get a response. So I thought I'd share in case anyone else out there fancies trying it.

I live in New Malden (Zone 4) which is a South West Trains (SWT) station. I work in Victoria so commute from New Malden to Clapham Junction, changing onto Southern. However, as I also tend to go out in London after work, getting buses and tube, I buy a Annual Oyster Card Zones 1-4 rather than a annual season ticket from New Malden to Victoria. Whilst more expensive, I only have to do about 1 or 2 tube journeys a week and it breaks even over going pay as you go.

New Malden is a national rail station and is not on one of TFLs services (ie the tube).

Whilst no Southern, SWT have been pretty appalling this year and so I was determined to get some compensation from them. Looking on the SWT website, I found the following:

southwesttrains(dot co dot uk)/tickets-explained/compensation/monthly-or-longer-including-annual-season-tickets/

Under the season ticket section it said the following, which concerned me:

"We will not compensate you:

If you purchased a Travelcard (either a 'paper' ticket or Oyster card) from a non-South West Trains outlet. We will consider your claim if you have proof that you use our services for all, or part, of your journey (e.g. a home or work address close to a station we serve, and details of the journey you make)."

Aside from those two sentences contradicting each other, it seems worded to me as to not encourage you to apply. Regardless, I decided to try. On my online oyster account I Had previously set it up to email me my travel statement every month which details all the journeys I'd taken. This clearly showed that everyday I started and ended a journey in New Malden. In addition, I sent proof of purchase of the season ticket (the print out of the receipt when I purchased it online).

As far as I can tell, for annual season tickets the compensation is calculated in "void days". These are calculated and published below:

southwesttrains(dot co dot uk)/about-us/our-commitments/performance/

As you can see, I'm not imagining the poor service and the Suburban routes which I live on lead the pack (As of January 2017) which 19 Void days.

0.5 of a void day equates to the single Peak cash fare of the journey that you make, in my case:

New Malden to Clapham Junction Peak = £3.70 * (19/0.5) = £140.60.

My compensation was £136, and I can only assume that the void figure given (19 days) was valid as it said only until the December 10th 2016 and that the 52 week average has slightly improved in the second half of December 2016 (data isn't published yet).

After my ticket expired I sent the 12 x Monthly travel statements, proof of ticket purchase and a cover letter stating my case to the SWT customer service centre (by post) and requesting the compensation in cash.

Anyway, despite the initially somewhat dismissive statements on the SWT website, I received an email today telling me of my compensation. All I had to do was call the customer centre and they put the money onto my debit card over the phone.

So, in short, if you use an Oyster card but in fact use it to travel on the National Rail part of the London Network, it's worth setting up the travel statements in advance. The reason being that the Oyster website only allows you to view journeys up to 2 months previously. The Annual ticket original cost me £1844, so a £136 refund equates to a 7.4% rebate.

I hope this is useful to anyone else who might think of doing this in the future.

mwpt

Very useful, just what I've been needing to know. Thank you.