"George" wrote:

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who runs a guest house
in Streatham and he was telling me how visitors to London who use PAYG
Oystercards are still being ripped off.

Two (of many) examples.

A guest with £15 on card gets a bus to Brixton, Victoria Line to
Stockwell, Northern Line to Bank and DLR to Cutty Sark and does the
return journey later that day, but when he boards a bus at Brixton he
gets a double bleep and the driver tells him he has no credit and will
have to pay to travel to Streatham. Being able to speak on a little
English and not being familiar with the system he pays up.

My guess is simply that he failed to touch-out on arrival at Cutty Sark or
failed to touch-in when starting his return journey from Cutty Sark.


A husband and wife go out for the day and make various journies
throughout the day, despite the fact that they have bothed touched in
and out and the same locations they have both had vastly different
amounts deducted from their cards.

That's simply not possible - if any two cards are touched in and out at the
same places then the exact same thing will happen to both of them -
computers are like that, as much as people might like to think that things
are happening randomly they are not.

(Did one card have a railcard discount loaded onto it? Did one card have
auto top-up enabled? Seems less likely if they were visitors, but either
could result in them ending up with different balances on their cards at the
end of the day.)


How much longer are people going to be ripped off like this? And
surely the London Tourist Board and similar organisations should be
telling visitors to London NOT to use Oyster and to buy a ODTC where
appropriate instead?

I think you should go to speakers' corner and have a good old shout about
it.

One particular thing I've seen many people doing is trying to touch-out or
touch-in on the wrong Oyster pads at station gatelines, where those
gatelines are unattended and hence left open - i.e. people leaving the
station don't look for the green arrow light to indicate that the gate is an
exit gate and instead try to touch-out on the inactive Oyster pad on the
wrong side of an entry gate is (or vice versa for people entering a station
and trying to use an inactive Oyster pad on an exit gate) - also people
walking through open gates before then remembering they need to touch-out,
but instead touching-in on Oyster pads on entry gates. Part of the problem
here can be that the lights on the gate's PED unit (? - it stands for
something that I can't recall off-hand) are sometimes rather faint.