Hi Mike,

I am really struggling with TfL customer services here. I totally understand your point about discounted Oyster cards, however they continue to insist that a blue adult rate Oyster does not offer the same features as contactless, namely the best value combination for journeys. They continue to insist that oyster will always cap for all zones passed through rather than charging extension fares.

What they continue to state is

“Best Value Combination cap is different for Oyster and Contactless Payment Cards (CPC) purely because CPC takes into account extension fares on single journeys and Oyster does not.

This is due to Oyster being old technology and it simply was not possible to implement this way of calculating caps.

They would suggest to use CPC for the best value on travel of this type.”

Since 27/09/2021, when Oyster introduced weekly fare capping, oyster is processed through the same backend system as Contactless. As Oyster is not charged on a daily basis, the system works slightly differently.

“Each validation would now be run through the same back office system used for contactless to ensure the customer received the best value for their travel. If the customer was overcharged an automatic refund would be made to their Oyster card via the Faster Universal Load (FUL) facility.” If there is a refund due it will be sent to the Oyster card when the refund due exceeds £1.50, or once 14 days has passed.

For example if you look at TRU 139 (Obtained via an FOI Request) FOI-1196-2223, you will find it states:

“One of the key features of contactless payment, is that each journey is fed through to the TfL back-office systems, which then calculate the value of the whole day’s travel.
Each day, providing the customer does not have any incomplete journeys, the cost of travel will be capped at the appropriate Daily Cap.

After End of Day, the customer is then charged one single amount covering all of their day’s travel and this will be repeated through the week on each day that they use their contactless payment card / device.

The cost of each day’s travel is then compared against the appropriate Weekly Cap, to ensure that between Monday and Sunday, the cost of their journeys does not exceed the Weekly Cap (which is set at the same price as the corresponding 7 Day Travelcard).

When Weekly Capping was introduced on Oyster for rail PAY users on 27 September 2021, we were advised that the customer would continue to be charged for each journey up to the Daily Cap but each validation would now be run through the same back office system used for contactless to ensure the customer received the best value for their travel. If the customer was overcharged an automatic refund would be made to their Oyster card via the Faster Universal Load (FUL) facility.”

Therefore the information TfL customer services are providing, conflicts the information provided by TfL’s own revenue team.

Am I getting the wrong end of the stick here? Or are TfL really unaware of their own revenue collection systems?