Great Western Coffee Shop

The teams of staff that normally deal with this have a massive work load, not only advance tickets there is also season ticket refunds.

Also it should be remembered this staff group will be either working from home or the numbers of staff able to work in their offices could be reduced to 25% of the normal desk occupancy to manage the social distancing.

Given the office capacity the ToC's may have deemed the teams that deal with refunds as not key allowing office space available for the people who managing the current services.

Today I tried to claim a refund on an advance ticket booked through the SWR site in mid March. Despite guidance to the contrary on the site there is no facility to claim the refund in "My Account". There is an on line form to claim refunds and I duly completed this.  However getting it to submit proved a step too far as I was repeatedly getting error messages - refresh and try again.  I finally resorted to using their standard feedback form and have received an automated acknowledgement. An exercise in making the simple difficult.  Has anyone else experiemced this problem with the SWR site?

We’re working hard to process refunds quickly, but with a large increase in requests this is taking longer than usual.

We’ve increased the capacity at our refund centre, so we can speed up the process and get your refund processed sooner.

Thank you for your patience.

Why is Eurostar setting a deadline for using its vouchers?

It won’t offer a refund as only one leg of the journey has been cancelled due to coronavirus

We’ve received around 23,000 requests for refunds in the last five weeks, of which 5,000 have already been processed.

For those who have requested a refund, please see below an important message from our MD Mark Hopwood

We continue to keep our refund policy under review during the period of COVD 19 restrictions and understand that the virus may have impacted our guests’ reasons for travel after the end of May. We await further Government guidance on any changes to current restrictions.

However, we do recognise that for some guests plans may have already been impacted.

Any guest who has purchased a Fixed Ticket prior to March 22nd and was planning to attend an event or travel from overseas between 30th May and 31st August 2020, and has now had an element of their trip cancelled, can apply for a refund, with no administration fee

Still no communication from GWR.  We are now over 6 weeks since the claim which was made through the "My Account" section of their site and 5 weeks since the intended travel date. I have not even received the email apologising for the delay. By contrast my claim to SWR submitted on 27 April has been approved today. I wonder of my problem is the method of submission of the claim and should I contact them to check on its status. Any views?

It appears that the error may have been made by me. It appears that you can only claim through "My account" if the tickets have not been collected.  On line claim forms now submitted

Thank you for not travelling. If you have train tickets you’re not using:

We’ve 2x the time you can claim a refund to 8 weeks for unused tickets
Monday 11 is the last day to backdate your claim to 17 March for season tickets

Season Tickets can be refunded at any time and train companies calculate how much is refunded by how much value is left on your ticket. They do this by deducting the value of any other tickets you could have travelled with in the same time until you stopped using your Season Ticket. This refund can be backdated up to 56 days from when it is submitted, to the last date it was used (or to 17 March 2020, whichever is later) if you were unable to travel due to the government’s guidance about only travelling if essential during the pandemic.
If you were unable to travel due to illness immediately before the government’s guidance was given in March, you can apply for this to be backdated further with evidence of the period you were ill.
To see how much you could get back from your Season Ticket, try the Season Ticket Refund Calculator below. For more information, including if you require a refund due to sickness that prevented you from using a Season Ticket, see the Season Ticket Conditions page.

Anyone know what GWR's response time is currently on refunds. Put two claims in on 7th May but no response as yet

We have received around 35,000 refund requests in total, and we have processed around 29,000 of them. This means, around 83% of requests have been processed, with around 6,000 currently outstanding.

We have been processing the requests according to date of application, with different teams working on different ticket types.

• Smartcard refund requests – processed up to 12 May application date
• Car park refund requests – processed up to 13 May application date
• Paper ticket refund requests – processed up to 25 May application date
• Website ticket refund requests – all processed

Please bear in mind that once your refund has been processed, it often takes three to five days for your bank to process our transaction.

We anticipate that we will process all outstanding refund requests by mid to late June. If you are a Smartcard holder, please refer to the below table to find out when you might be able to expect your refund.

There are now around 1,900 refund requests for which we’re waiting on further information from customers. If you think your request has been missed, please check your email and voicemail, and respond to us, so we can process your request as soon as possible.

Anyone know what GWR's response time is currently on refunds. Put two claims in on 7th May but no response as yet

Season ticket on the 10th May and nothing yet. My advance ticket took 35 days so guess they're still working through the backlog.

I did get an email along the lines of still processing just before the advance ticket refund so I don't know if the acknowledgements go out as someone reaches your request?

I'd still like a bit more communication as more than £3K owed and I've had to buy a couple of on the day tickets which seems the worst of both worlds.

to update things I received an email today from GWR telling me that my refund will be with me shortly. That's without chasing