Originally Posted by
Mizter T
the advantage of having it on Oyster is that you can just use it in combination with Pay-as-you-go credit loaded on the same card to travel to other places in London (well to be precise the PAYG area - that's zones 1-9 plus a handful of stations just beyond) which are beyond the zones covered by your Travelcard without having to buy extension tickets before setting off.
Note that (as a slightly separate point) you can now have a gold card (or any other applicable railcard) loaded on to a PAYG-only Oyster to give you the same discount within London as you used to get with paper tickets.
Another advantage is that with a paper/printed ticket they only allow you one replacement (because of the fraud risk)
This is only for loss, however. For damaged/worn tickets, you can get as many as you want, provided you can present the old ticket. And that's a good thing, too - it's hard to get through a year with fewer than 4 of them! Explaining this to a grumpy ticket agent at King's Cross on a Monday morning is not always straightforward, though.
With an annual season ticket, you get 52 weeks for the price of 40. And yes you can both amend it and also get a refund for the unused portion of it (up to 40 weeks into its validity) - again (reasonable) admin fees apply.
Just to be clear, though, you don't get a pro-rata refund. You get the difference between the cost of the gold card and what the cost would have been if made up of monthly and weekly tickets instead, minus the admin fee. However, this still means that you're not losing out.
And just to be clear, regardless of who you buy it from, an annual Travelcard is by default a 'Gold Card', which provides for the third-off discount on off-peak rail fares in the south east.
Indeed, and do shop around, as TOCs offer various bonuses of their own for Gold Cards - from free travel vouchers to unlimited weekend travel (on the TOC's network)!
A new annual season has appeared - a discounted version of Exeter Central to Exeter St David's - which is cheaper than the Ticket to Ryde. However, it's not yet clear whether or not this will get gold card benefits (or possibly also Devon & Cornwall ones).
There's also a couple of Southern Tickets that are as cheap - Newhaven Town to Newhaven Harbour and Pevensey & Westham to Pevensey Bay.
(Newhaven Harbour is a bizarre station, as it has a 'platform 3', which is actually a separate station - Newhaven Marine. This is a 'ghost station' - it's legally open, and has a service running once a day in the evening. However, as the station/platform is crumbling, public access is prohibited due to Health & Safety...)