The world is currently battling a pandemic of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the UK has enacted ‘social distancing’ and told people to work from home if they possibly can. This has seen a drastic reduction in people using transport (such as trains) and in turn train companies have significantly cut their services.
Nobody knows how long this situation will persist for. Many people are talking about the ‘new normal’ and how this will lead to a significant rise in people working from home. We don’t know how that will play out and won’t comment here.
Like many of you, I am now working from home, although my children do their best to disrupt me! I wasn’t however sure as to whether I should take a refund on my train season ticket. My thought process was as follows:
1) How long will this ‘lockdown’ last for?
38 days and counting…. We have no idea how long these restrictions will last. The Government talks of measures to ‘relax’ some conditions, so it would seem unlikely that we’ll all be back on the trains within a month or so. The Government has allowed refunds to be backdated to 17th of March, which allows everyone some flexibility.
2) Will I lose out through the arcane refund formula?
Season tickets refunds are worked out in a rather confusing manner. Rather than refund for time left on the ticket, you get back the difference between what you paid for the ticket and what would you have had to paid if you bought monthly or weekly tickets to cover the journeys made so far, these tickets being a higher per a journey price than an annual season. This means that if you have 2 months or less on your annual season ticket, you will get no refund at all.
We think this is unfair at the current times. In normal circumstances then this is understandable, as it stop people taking advantage of the special reductions for annual tickets, but we are not in normal circumstances. The Government has passed a law, telling us to stay home. We should not be penalised trying to get money back for a service we are no longer able to benefit from. We have taken this argument to Government and twice the rail minister has brushed us off with a comment that essentially boils down to, “it’s too hard” and “computer says no”. Try again minister.
3) If I get a refund, how long will it take? Will I face a cash shortfall through buying a ticket and receiving my refund?
I was concerned about this point but I decided to take a refund of my ticket on 22nd April and so I thought I’d share my timeline:
Prior to April 22nd – I had seen on twitter comments that it would take up to 56 days to process a refund, which really put me off, but I couldn’t see an end to these measures and felt that getting the refund would ultimately be worth it, even if I ended up out of pocket in the short term.
April 22nd – I followed Southeastern’s refund calculator
– I was pleasantly surprised with my calculation (see below)
I then requested the refund online. It quoted a much lower figure as it doesn’t automatically allow you to backdate your claim. However, there is an option to say you disagree with the amount quoted. Click this to go to a second form, which provides an option to backdate your claim. Weirdly, it doesn’t let you say why you disagree.
This was late in the evening and I received an automated mail saying that due to the current conditions, it may take longer to respond blah blah blah. Everyone’s in the same position and we’re all adapting as best we can so this wasn’t unexpected.
April 23 – Early in the morning (07:18), I received an email saying that my refund had been successful and that I was going to get a refund of £2,136.50. This would be refunded to the account I purchased the ticket from (Paypal) ‘very shortly’. I noted the amount was less than the refund calculator, despite all the inputs being the same and so I emailed customer services to query the differing amounts (£66.10). I received an automated message explaining that response times are slower than normal.
April 30 – I received the payment through from Paypal, which then automatically routed to my credit card. I have not yet received a response from Southeastern, but I’m not particularly surprised at that.
In conclusion, if you have not yet done so, I would advocate getting a refund for the majority of people. One exception would be if you have been using your ticket relatively recently as your refund will be limited to the date you last used it (I last used a train on the 16th of March). Likewise, if you have a short period on your ticket then I would run the calculator and assess whether it’s going to give you any value at all.