Tap on/tap off payment mistake: successful claim for reimbursement
2 August 2023

The tap on/tap off system for paying for single fares on Cornwall’s buses generally works very well, as does the daily and weekly capping feature of the system. However, occasionally mistakes can happen where a fare is charged incorrectly. 

An example of a mistake was when I travelled on a Go Cornwall no. 40 bus from Truro to Chacewater. I tapped on at Truro bus station and then tried to tap off at Chacewater. However, the Ticketer machine on the bus where you would normally tap off did not seem to be working. I tried a few times without success. I then asked the driver if I could tap off on his main ticket machine, which I did.

When I looked at my Littlepay record of my journeys, I saw that I had been charged for my Truro to Chacewater journey correctly at £2 but that there was also a journey starting from Chacewater (for some reason, named as Kerley Downs) on the GCB40 with no tap off.  Because there was no further tap off for that second journey, I was charged for an “incomplete” journey, also £2. When this happens, there is a box on the Littlepay website where you can ask for a refund and you have to explain why. I duly completed that box and said that I thought that what had happened was that the Ticketer machine must have tapped me off without my realising that it had done so, and then, when I tapped the main ticket machine, it recorded me as starting a new journey. I pointed out that, as it appeared that I had started a new journey within 5 seconds of finishing the previous journey, it was obviously not on a new bus and must have been, as I had surmised, a case of a double tap on the same bus.

I saw today that the operator has given me the £2 refund and it has appeared back in my bank account. Obviously, this was a very trivial example and I would not normally have bothered to dispute a £2 mistake but I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to see if anyone actually read the requests for refunds and did something about it.

So, well done to Go Cornwall Bus and thank you!