Delay Repay: sometimes it takes four attempts!
On Saturday 29 June I departed Wareham on the 16.31 service to London Waterloo where it arrived thirty-two minutes late at 19.21. Accordingly, I missed my intended train back from Waterloo East to Sevenoaks. The 20.30 to Bat & Ball was on time, but due to the late running South Western Railway service this was half an hour later than I should have been.
I submitted a delay repay claim to South Western Railway in this respect. However, the South Western Railway online claim form is misleading if you are not only travelling on their services and my claim was rejected. The website asks users to select from a suggested list of train services that you might have used, and if none of listed were applicable to enter details of the actual journey you made. In this respect I entered details of the services I travelled on. This caused the claim to be rejected because they required to be advised of my intended journey that failed. However, I do not consider the wording on their website requests this information. The rejection advice suggests that you should resubmit your claim if you disagree with their decision. This I did, and the claim was rejected again. On the second resubmission attempt it was accepted and I was advised that I was due £2.17 compensation.
I disagreed with this calculation because they appear to have only paid compensation for my journey from Waterloo East to Bat & Ball; I told them that the calculations should be as follows for the delay of 30-59 minutes in reaching my final destination: Wareham to Waterloo – Single ticket £8.90 – 50% compensation = £4.45 plus Waterloo East to Bat & Ball – Off-Peak Day Return ticket £8.65 – 25% compensation = £2.17. So I requested that an additional compensation payment of £4.45 be sent to me; this has now been agreed and I am currently waiting for a payment.
This episode shows that what Transport Focus and others have been saying about the difficulty of claiming Delay-Repay and the arbitrary rejection or reduction of valid claims is, despite the assurances given, still not being addressed by the train operating companies.
Well, at long last Failing Grayling has finally gone, so with luck we’ll get a competent Transport Secretary who will shake things up !
If it takes 3 attempts to get the correct DR repaid, you should claim for your time having to resubmit.
If they reject that, I’d wave the CRA and “reasonable skill and care” in providing the contracted service at them.
It seems (now I’m their victim rather than Southeastern’s) that SWR are competing in the race to the bottom for customer service.
The new Secretary of State for Transport is Grant Shapps. That’s good news: he wants to get rid of GTR. So let’s hope we’ll soon get TfL taking over the metro services on both the Dunton Green and Bat & Ball lines !
I had a similar situation with South Eastern recently. The 07.12 service from Borough Green to Blackfriars was cancelled so I claimed Delay Repay. It was rejected as I was told I could have got the 7.25 Victoria train, changed at Bromley South and would have arrived at Blackfriars 29 minutes late (very important that one minute!!!). I challenged it, because I said I needed to travel on a direct service rather than change for reasons that I did not need to disclose to SE Trains (I had a back problem which was making walking difficult so didn’t want to be hopping on and off trains when I could get a direct service). They still rejected it, giving the same reason, and I’m afraid I gave up. I did get a cheery email saying that they were rejecting it, but that they hoped my next journey would be trouble free – so that’s alright then (not….).
@Karen: Was there an announcement at Borough Green that passengers for Blackfriars should take the 0725 Victoria train and change at Bromley South? It’s not obvious that this would be better than waiting for the next Blackfriars train, although the journey is shown as a connection on National Rail Enquiries.
@Secretary – Sorry, I have only belatedly seen your response. No, as far as I recall there was no announcement at all, even to the extent that the Blackfriars train was cancelled. We only discovered that from the app, and from the display board at the station.