Contactless – but not necessarily cheapest!
The Contactless system is finally now live for Sevenoaks, Otford, Shoreham and Eynsford.
However the details have a number of gotchas, and many people will still need to think about their journey carefully before using it.
First, contactless is only available for journeys where both the starting station and the final station have been enabled for Contactless and the entire journey is in the contactless zone. Journeys from Sevenoaks to central London are fine, but Sevenoaks to Tonbridge is not (Tonbridge has not been enabled for Contactless) and Sevenoaks to Gatwick via Tonbridge is not (while Sevenoaks and Gatwick are both in the Contactless Zone, Tonbridge is not). If you try to use Contactless for a journey where it turns out to be unavailable you could be liable for both a Penalty Fare for the journey you made and a Maximum Contactless Fare because you touched-in but did not touch-out.
Second, Contactless does not guarantee the cheapest fare. Working out what is best can be complex, but some of the main cases to consider include:
- Contactless does not give Railcard discounts. So if you have a Railcard that’s valid for the journey it’s almost always better to buy paper tickets or a Off-Peak Day Travelcard (which has a 33% discount for Railcard holders).
- The Off-Peak Day cap for Contactless from Sevenoaks is £21.40 whereas the Off-Peak Day Travelcard is currently £20.80 (it’s going up on 5 March). For almost all cases the Travelcard is cheaper for full fare payers, and also has a hefty discount for Railcard holders. (Technically the Travelcard only allows one journey from Sevenoaks to the Zone 6 boundary, so Contactless would be better for non-Railcard holders making two separate return journeys from Sevenoaks to London in a day).
- According to Southeastern, Season Tickets may still work out cheaper than Contactless, even once the Weekly Cap of £131.50 is applied. We’ve not worked through an example of this yet, and Contactless might work out cheaper for some commuters with uneven commuting patterns since you only pay for the journeys you actually make.
- Contactless can in some circumstances link two legs of a journey that lead to a higher fare that you would not have paid if you bought separate paper tickets for each part of the journey. This particularly applies where the journey starts outside Zone 1 in the evening peak period but only reaches Zone 1 after the peak period ends: both legs are off-peak individually, but the combined journey is classed as a peak journey because (1) it started in the evening peak and (2) it was via Zone 1.
- Conversely, paper tickets allow a “break of journey” that would, for instance, allow you to go shopping in Bromley or Orpington on the way home from London to Sevenoaks and then complete the journey on the same ticket; Contactless would usually regard this as two separate journeys.
- Currently the TfL Fare Finder is showing Sevenoaks to Charing Cross as a £14.60 peak fare for 1600-1900, whereas the usual fare rule is that evening peak fares only apply on journeys from or via Zone 1; the Southeastern website correctly offers a paper ticket for £8.00. It’s not clear what fare the Contactless system would actually charge!!
There are other cases such as Advance Tickets or Super Off-Peak Day Returns, but these are not usually available for simple Sevenoaks to London travel.
There’s a section about this on the Southeastern website, but it does not cover all the cases we know about and no doubt more will emerge.
Caveat emptor!
As a Senior Railcard holder who frequently uses Bat & Ball Station, I find that there is frequently an issue that both the existing ticket machines are depressingly often out of order, as they were on both Thursday and Saturday of last week (and on Saturday of the previous week oin the case of the down side machine). A ticker inspector told me on Saturday that it is possible that the machines will not be fixed now that the contactless system is working. That is not good enough.
Thanks for this clarification – the pitfalls weren’t pointed out in Laura Trott MP’s column in the Sevenoaks Chronicle. Perhaps she isn’t aware.
To be fair, a lot of the complexities arise from the underlying national rail ticket and fare structures. That having been said, there is no known technical reason why a Railcard cannot be associated with a registered payment card to allow Railcard discounts to be automatically applied, and no reason why an overall “never knowing undersold” promise could not be made to cover the edge cases.
Avoid using Contactless when travelling into London in the evening peak, you will be charged £14.60 instead of the paper ticket £8.00 – as suggested above – as I discovered last week.
Yes, we experienced this on 6 February. When we raised the £14.60 fare with Southeastern they confirmed that it should be £8.00 and corrected the National Rail website within hours. But TfL have not yet responded to several enquiries about this. TfL have apparently been overcharging for certain journey from Reading for months, and only intend to correct the fare tables in one of the (infrequent) regular updates. They have also reportedly refused to promise automatic refunds to customers they have overcharged – even though they have all the data they need to process the refunds automatically back to the cards that were charged. See https://oysterfares.com/reading-to-zone-1-thousands-overcharged-in-fares-blunder/
You need to log onto your TfL Contactless account and submit an Incorrect Fare challenge. TfL are processing these very slowly (blaming their poor cybersecurity that led to them being hacked last year), but there is a time limit so you need to make sure that the claim for the refund is in the system. Please let us know if you get any response for TfL!