Back in late 2009 it was announced that Oyster pay-as-you-go would finally be accepted throughout the national rail network within London. Living in south-east London, this was great news to me. I’d lost count of the times that I’d forgotten I would be using a train on a Saturday afternoon when using my Oyster card on a local bus in the morning. Now all my journeys could count towards the travelcard price cap. As Christmas approached I filled in application forms for my youngest kids to get 5-10 Oyster zip-cards.
The cards duly arrived in the first week of January and we were all set for our first regular trip between Crayford and Sidcup on a Thursday afternoon when the snow arrived. It did give me a chance to set up auto top-up though, but then an email arrived that was to change everything.
It was from the Family and Friends Railcard team and explained that although I couldn’t use my card with the oyster cards, I could still purchase paper tickets at a discount and often this would be cheaper. I started to do some research and quickly found quite significant savings. That discovery prompted me to start this site with a view to spreading the word.
hi there, am new to this site, hoping it can help work out how best to use Oyster card, just wondering who you are, why you set up this site – can see the reason above, which is fine, just wanted to know if you were receiving financial backing from somewhere, organisation or not, and if so, from whom. met someone recently whose written a book about Oyster and how it could be improved, quick look at this site shows me that it might already be covering the how-to-use-Oyster-best. appreciate yr response. i don’t mind if you are paid by Oyster to run this site, just wanted to know. many thanks. cheers sloefoxes
Hi sloefoxes,
I’d love it to be funded by someone, but it’s not, apart from a little ad revenue. I would certainly not want funding from Oyster because I want the freedom to say what I want about the system.
Hope that helps.