My own personal use of Oyster has been ticking along quite nicely of late. I check journey history regularly and get statements from time to time to keep records for posterity. You can imagine my surprise this morning when I received an email telling me that I was due a refund “for operational reasons”. Previous experience tells me that I won’t get to find out what the reason is, but hey, who’s complaining?
Well I am actually. For some reason best known to the programmers of the system I have to pick this refund up from London Bridge Underground. This was the place that I originally activated auto top-up, back in the days before Southeastern joined Oyster. I very rarely go there these days so I will have to wait 8 days for the refund to expire and then receive the email inviting me to select a new station. Why can’t they then set that new station as the default place to send operational refunds?
Good point. They should find a way to allow you to nominate a station which is assigned to your account and which they can then send all refunds to,whether they’re operational or individual ones that you have had to request.
Well I’ve leart something new today. You can also pick up refunds while touching out. Yesterday I went to Kings Cross. On the way there I used FCC becasue it’s cheaper, but my return was during the evening peak when there were no through trains to London Bridge. Hence I used the Underground instead. This morning I received an email confirming that I’d successfully picked up my refund.
I still don’t know what it was for though.