On Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:25:41 +0100, Mike Bristow wrote:
In article ,
David Walters wrote:
On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:42:12 +0100, Neil Williams
wrote:
I'm not totally clear what the need for ticket offices on a metro
system is.

I use them to add customer charter credit vouchers to my Oyster balance
and buy through tickets to places like Bracknell. Both could be done at
a suitable ticket machine but not the current ones.

The right way to handle customer charter credit is to have a bit
on the form which says "if you want the credit applied to your
oyster card, tick here (note: this only applies if your oyster card
is registered to you)".

Might need some tweaking (ie, nominate a station; enter your oyster
card number), but frankly it would be much easier to have a top-up
when I passed through my home station than collect little bits of
paper and have to queue to get them added to my card.

You already have to enter your Oyster card number so that is covered
but nominating a station could be tricky for an irregular traveller as
I think the gates only remember that kind of thing for a week and you
don't know how long it will take to process the refund.

A ticket machine with a suitable network connection when presented with an
Oyster card could offer the option to query a central database for any
refunds, auto-top-up changes etc. At the gate such a look up would slow
down lots of people but it could probably take 30 seconds without being
a problem at a ticket machine. I expect there is a big wish list of this
kind of thing somewhere in TfL towers.