Calculating Refund on Season Ticket

epm-84

Black_Monk said:

Dear All
I have a similar question, I did claim a refund as soon as I was told to work from home but I don't understand how the refund was calculated.  I bought a ticket for travel between my home town and London from 24th February to 3rd April, 40 days travel for £586.50.  I was told to work from home on the 19th March, I refunded my ticket when I got back to my home station, it had been used for 25 days.  Now doing a pro-rata calculation I reckon I have used (25/40) x 586.50 = £366.56 of the value of my ticket
so I would have expected a discount of 586.50 - 366.56 - 10.00 = £209.94
My refund was actually £132.60 (£77.34 less)
Now many thanks to Owain_Moneysaver for that link that states the rail companies don't base refunds on pro-rata usage, but how then are they calculating it?  I don't understand what a longer term discount has to do with it, any refund should be based solely on how much the ticket cost?
Please enlighten me!

What kind of ticket do you have which allows 40 days travel?

Standard rail tickets are normally 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.

Regarding why they aren't pro-rata, look at it this way:
Manchester-London Anytime Return £360
Manchester-London Monthly Season £1552

Now say you need to go from Manchester to London for a last-minute meeting and you have to travel at peak time.  If the season ticket refunds were pro-rata then you could buy a monthly season ticket at 7am on Monday morning for £1552, then get a refund of around of £1475 minus a £10 admin fee on Monday evening, after making one return journey saving you around £290.  How many people do you think would use that loophole if it existed?

p00hsticks

epm-84 said:

What kind of ticket do you have which allows 40 days travel?

Standard rail tickets are normally 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.

You can get season tickets for any period of time between a month and a year. Before I had the finance to be able to afford an annual ticket,  I (like many others I suspect) would buy tickets for around a month but always extend them for however many days was necessary to ensure they ended on a Friday, and then start the next one on the following Monday.

https://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/service/seasonticket/search

You give a good explanation of why refunds aren't 'pro-rata' - thanks.

epm-84

p00hsticks said:

epm-84 said:

What kind of ticket do you have which allows 40 days travel?

Standard rail tickets are normally 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 12 months.

You can get season tickets for any period of time between a month and a year. Before I had the finance to be able to afford an annual ticket,  I (like many others I suspect) would buy tickets for around a month but always extend them for however many days was necessary to ensure they ended on a Friday, and then start the next one on the following Monday. 

I sometimes use up some spare annual leave when that's happens or alternatively use complimentary rail vouchers I get from Delay Repay claims - Northern allow you to chose to get a single journey voucher for a 30 minute delay, a return for a 60 minute delay or 2 returns for a 120 minute delay which works out to be more generous than the cash compensation equivalent.

What I was trying to get at by asking about why it's non-standard was to check it was a monthly season with extra days added, not some kind of special ticket which would have different refund conditions.

LazySaver

Owain_Moneysaver said:

How it's actually calculated is the season tickets you would have needed to buy for the period from 12 July 2019 to today, which is 9 months, so you'd be charged 9 monthly seasons (some at 2019 prices and some at 2020 prices as the fares change on 1 January), and any weekly seasons to make up odd days. You don't get back 3/12ths of the annual cost.

I'm pretty annoyed now as I applied for a refund just after the 'stay at home' started, based on MSE saying that the season tickets would be refunded on a pro-rata basis (This was before the train company updated their website for anything to do with Corona). I've now just been offered a refund of about half what I believe it should be which is ridiculous - If I went back to work in the next few weeks it would actually cost me more in tickets than the refund, even though I wouldn't have been travelling for 2 months! As part of the refund process I was told to cut up my card and that they've cancelled it so that they can't revert the refund request, otherwise I would just keep the ticket.

It's madness, I can't travel to work for at least 2 months and have to pay all the additional costs of being at home during that time, and it will end up costing me more in rail fares than if I had been going to work every day - Out of pocket twice!

Usually I think MSE is pretty reliable but this has just cost me money so I'm not impressed.

ThunderHoof

epm-84 said:

Owain_Moneysaver said:

Any refund is calculated from the date after the Season Ticket was returned to the retailer, and will be  the difference 

....

There may also be an administration charge of no more that £10.00.

....

You won't get a refund for the period between 17th March and now, as you could have used your ticket. You should have applied for your refund as soon as possible.

That's what usually applies but in the current circumstances it's incorrect as special rules have been put in place.  You have until 12th May to claim refunds for unused parts of season tickets from 17th March and the £10 admin fee will not be charged.  It needs to be returned to the original point of sale - so if that was Lancaster station then it needs to be either Lancaster station or another station where the ticket office is managed by the same 

Actually special measures have been put in place so that people don't have to visit ticket offices (many of which are closed anyway), they can apply online through the ticket station operators website, in my case Arriva. I sent them a photograph of my defaced cut up season ticket and after a few weeks I got my refund, didn't even need to send them the original back.