Gagravarr

The ever-excellent London Reconnections did a piece on this a few weeks back, explaining all about the complications with changing the system!
http://www.londonreconnections.com/2...future-oyster/

paperwastage

yup, it's T+4 days (monday today, allows me to choose Mon-Friday)\



chip+sig worked fine on a ticket machine topup in central london

blitzen

Hi,

As the London tube accepts contactless credit card payments I'm wondering if there is list which US issued cards are accepted

My niece will be 10 so she rides for free. Is there a separate kid line or how is it handled?

Thanks,
Marc

BigFlyer

First you need a US Issued contactless card - there are very few.

Here is the Transport for London page:

https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payment...-payment-cards

I can tell you that the Transport for London page is incorrect when it says that all Amex contactless cards will work on Tfl. I attempted to use a contactless Amex card recently and it did not work - despite the fact the card worked fine (and contactlessly) at other merchants.

I ended up using Android Pay - which worked with my Citibank card but not with my Chase card.

Bear in mind that the cost of an Oyster card is fully refundable, along with any value on the card. You can now obtain the refund from machines in the stations, you no longer need to find a live agent. The strange thing is it refunds the deposit on your card, apparently rendering the card unusable - but, you get to keep the dead card. So you essentially pay a deposit for the card, but get the deposit back without surrendering the physical card.

I was in London a few years ago with a child that could ride for free, he just walked through the fare gates with me.

(BTW, I assume you are referring to using the contactless cards at the fare gates. You can use any US credit card to purchase an Oyster card or other tickets.)

blitzen

Bigflyer thanks that helps. As we are two adult I would even need to find 2 cards that work good to know that all can be done at the machine nowadays

VickiSoCal

Yes, your kid walks through with you.

If your kid is not used to public transport stand off to the side and watch a few people go through and make sure they get it. Try to make your first trip at a less busy time. We did this for the first time when the kids were 4 and 7 and each of us took one kid through with us.

blitzen

Thanks that helps. We are only in London (CP City at Blackfriars) for a short time and the tube will increase the things we can see (and if my niece "I am soo tired Can't walk another step" //// OK there is a McDs and off she runs

Ldnn1

I appreciate your niece's reluctance, but I must say Blackfriars is a great location as there are so many places you can walk to from there - both east and west. I'd really encourage walking as much as possible.

Also remember that you can use the Thameslink rail line instead of the Tube for places like St Pancras/Granary Square, and also for an easy day trip to Brighton if that takes your fancy.

Calchas

You can go through the wide gates, which allow a bit more time between opening and closing.

Alternatively find a member of staff who will open a gate for the child.

I would not try to rush through the narrow gates with a child as they are designed to catch fare evaders.

sxpsxpsxp

I'm (hopefully) heading to London with family this summer (2 adults and 2 kids -- 6 and 12), and I'm trying to wrap my head around fares and tickets. I've read and re-read the TFL website multiple times and I seriously think it is designed to be confusing.

We're staying in London 9 nights (likely Canary Wharf), so I fully expect to be using DLR, tube and/or buses on a daily basis. It seems to me that due to arriving/departing in the middle of a week, a 7-day travel card for zones 1-2 is a slightly better value than just relying on the daily/weekly cap. For some reason the Visit Britain Shop price for this is $55, but the TFL visitor shop price for it is £37, which according to Google is around $50. Can I buy it from the UK site and have it mailed to the US? The paper travel card is still a thing, right? Or should I buy the Oyster cards once I get to London and load digital travel cards on them?

Unless I'm reading it wrong, there doesn't seem to be a way to get the youth discount for the 12-year-old using pay-as-you-go with contactless. Is that right?

And I'm confused about free travel for my 6-year-old. Do I have to find a person to open the gate, or do we just walk through the gate together as some of the earlier posts suggest?

Thanks.

13901

Correct.

If you're planning to do more than 2 trips per day then a travel card is better value for money. The daily cap in zone 1-2 is £7.40, the weekly travelcard is £37.00. For the two extra days you'll be here... I'd just rely on the daily capping. Bear in mind that if you go to Zone 3 (or any other zone that isn't in your card), or if you go on a ferry, or the cable car, or a train that isn't covered by the Travelcard... Oyster will deduct money from your pay-as-you-go account (on Oyster you can have a pass and "floating" cash).

I wouldn't worry too much about getting the cards before arriving here. You can buy a Oyster at a newsagent, or most stations (You can at Heathrow and I think also LCY). The card itself is £5, which is refunded when you return it, and then you can add some cash and the travelcard. You can do everything at a self-service kiosk.

That's what I read too. In fact most of the youngsters I see on the Tube have their Oyster Zip card with their photo on it.

What I see being done by people with young children is indeed that they go through the gates together. Every station has two kind of gates, the one with plastic barriers:



And the larger ones with glass flaps:




Don't use the narrow plasticky ones, go to the larger ones and simply go through with your younger child. One key thing to bear in mind with those gates is that, unlike the narrow ones, at most stations they work both ways, meaning that they can be use for entering or exiting (this is because in most places there's usually one or two of them and not more). When you get in or out, you tap your card on the yellow reader (you can see it in the upper right hand corner of the photo above).

The reader (see photo below) has a LED light that can be red or orange (in the photo it's that orange dot just above the reader). when it's orange it means that the gate is ready to accept a card tap from your side, and not from the other. On the large gates that work for both entry and exit this status 'flips' every couple of seconds from one side to the other, so if you tap when the light is red... it won't open. Just wait for it to go orange, tap and you're out.

:D!

Do not buy the visitor oyster, it's easy to buy a regular oyster at a ticket machine when you arrive. You have to pay postage and the £5 fee is never refundable. The £5 fee for a regular oyster is refundable after a year, as explained below.

Paper weekly travelcards are not available from TfL, but they are available from National Rail stations (you buy a ticket from a London station to another London station and make it a travelcard). They require a passport photo to make a separate photo card which is required to travel with a rail season ticket.

Under 10s are not free on national rail services, only on TfL.

For the 12yo you have to find someone to set the Young Visitor discount on a normal oyster.

Provided that you will meet the daily cap most days, yes a weekly travelcard plus 2 days is likely to be cheaper if you aren't here for a full Mon-Sun week. This is also true for all zone combinations.

​​​

No, the £5 oyster card fee is only refunded 12 months after the card is purchased. Prior to this it is not refunded if you return the card.

The refund is in the form of £5 added to your PAYG balance the first time you touch in to a travel mode between 12 and 18 months after purchase. You can then refund the entire balance to cash at TfL ticket machines that accept cash, if the balance is £10 or less. (That means the balance has to be £5 or less, plus the cost of the travel - which could be £0 for a Heathrow terminal transfer.)

​​​​​​If the balance is over £10 you can get a refund by bank transfer, or unhelpfully for visitors without a UK bank account, cheque.

If you don't use the card 12-18 months after purchase, you can contact TfL in the 6 months before you will next use the card and they will set up a new £5 load on your next touch in.

With reference to the OPs point about TfL being confusing, look at how many words it took to explain something which should be simple.

13901

Gee, I lived 15+ years in London and that's something I didn't know. And I returned unused cards! TfL is more byzantine than Byzantium itself.

:D!

Oh, the card deposit used to be fully refundable as you said - it was instantly refundable until they closed all ticket offices, then you had to wait 48 hours after purchase, then 24.

The current system started on 23 Feb 2020, but didn't get much publicity because of you know what, as well as the improvements to contactless meaning that most tourists don't need oysters any more.

Refunding oysters was a method of generating credit card points, though somewhat inefficient as the refund would often be in coins. But it may have been one reason for the change.

Scots_Al

A somewhat niche pastime for the ultra-dedicated, surely?! I can't imagine how many Oyster cards you would need to buy and refund at £5 a pop to make it worthwhile.