Question 8 – 18 Jun 2020: Season ticket refund backlog

[whole diary]

[Red Squirrel]

Some season ticket refunds have been acknowledged but repayment is still awaited. When do you expect to have "caught up" / is it possible some cases have fallen down cracks somewhere?  If someone applied and was acknowledged in (say) April,when might they hear further?  There is some disquiet that annual season ticket refunds are not "pro rata" - people purchased a bulk annual product in good faith and on instruction from government have been ordered not to use it.  Why should the repayment be less than half the amount paid if the travel purchased is no longer being legally offered for half the period?

[Jason Ness]

We’ve received an unprecedented number of refund requests since Lockdown started and that has been challenging, especially as we changed our processes to give customers a route to apply for a refund online when they would have done so at a station normally. We’ve just about got through them all now and have refunded 95% of the requests we’ve received since late March.

If anyone has been waiting since April for their refund something may have gone awry as they should have heard from us by now. Happy to pick up any queries offline via jason.ness@gwr.com.

Annual Season Tickets are heavily discounted compared to daily/weekly tickets, with the last 2 months of travel effectively free. When a customer requests a refund, we take the cost of time used (using the cost of monthly, weekly and daily tickets), and refund the remainder (minus a £10.00 admin fee).  So, customers who surrender their Season Tickets early pay no more, or no less, than another customer who bought tickets to cover the period used. 

[grahame]

An update ... several reports elsewhere on the forum of repayments coming through in recent days.  I think we have "issue closed", thank you.