Transport User Voice – January – Awareness of compensation for rail timetable chaos

21 December 2018

Transport User Panel research on Thameslink and Great Northern

Make a claim, make sure your voice is heard!

Recent research with our Transport User Panel confirmed that Thameslink and Great Northern must do more to encourage their passengers to come forward and claim compensation for disruption suffered during the timetable crisis of last summer, before the deadline of Thursday 31 January 2019.

In July 2018, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) announced details about additional compensation available to passengers travelling on Thameslink and Great Northern services who had been impacted by disruption caused by the timetable changes in May. In November 2018, Thameslink and Great Northern passengers on our Transport User Panel were asked about their awareness of this additional compensation and their experience of making a claim.

The results suggested a large proportion of regular travellers (89 per cent) had good awareness of compensation and that where they had claimed they found the process easy. At the same time, nearly a fifth of passengers (18 per cent) had incorrectly ruled themselves out, often because anxiety around their eligibility had undermined their willingness to claim and 11 per cent said that they had not heard about the compensation at all.

Transport Focus believes it is important that more GTR passengers claim compensation, so they send a clear message to the rail industry.  It wants GTR to do more to tell passengers that industry compensation is available even where someone has already claimed GTR’s usual Delay Repay or enhanced compensation during the qualifying period. Likewise, it wants GTR to do more to raise awareness, especially among passengers who travelled on daily tickets, including those issued by Transport for London or those using an Oyster card (who need only submit their Oyster card number, because GTR can use this to check a passenger’s journey history using its own records).

Additional compensation offered to Thameslink and Great Northern passengers – Transport User Panel Survey is available to read on the Transport Focus website.

All users now have until 31 January to submit a claim to the GTR compensation scheme. The deadline to submit a claim for season ticket holders has been extended to the same date.

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