Fine for buying tickets. Awful if anything goes wrong.
I got a “final response”, then a director-level refusal telling me to go to LNER instead, then a reply partly in capital letters. They only paid after the Rail Delivery Group, which licenses them, stepped in. Even then they called it a one-off exception.
Won’t use them again.
Response from developer
Hi Alex, As you are aware, we are licensed to sell train tickets by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), and we are routinely audited to make sure we comply with their regulations for retailing tickets. The regulations specified by RDG for the disruption you encountered in your scenario, mean that we could only issue you a refund if you had returned to your point of origin. This is set out in condition 30.1 of the National Rail Conditions of Travel (NRCoT), which states "You are also entitled to a refund under these Conditions if you begin your journey but are unable to complete it due to a delay to, or cancellation of your service and you return to your point of origin". The specific clause of "and you return to your point of origin." was added by RDG in April 2024. Raileasy did not agree with the introduction of this clause, but we are bound by the terms of our retail license, as granted by RDG, to follow these rules. A random sample of refunds that we issue is audited after-the-fact by RDG to ensure we do. Not following these rules would mean our license would be suspended, and we would be unable to retail any more tickets. We are a small, family-owned, UK-based retailer, and so we follow the requirements as they are written. In your specific case, RDG agreed with our assessment that you were not eligible for a refund under the wording of condition 30.1, as you had not returned to your point of origin. RDG also did not dispute our assessment that your Regulation No 1371/2007 (Article 16) argument was only relevant to the railway undertaking (LNER) rather than the retailer. In order to help resolve your case and prevent occurrences for future passengers, we asked RDG in the first instance to revise the National Rail Conditions of Travel to remove the requirement to return to the point of origin. Alternatively, we suggested RDG could provide written authorisation to provide “special treatment” and issue a refund anyway, which we could keep on file for Raileasy’s next refund audit. RDG decided to give us this written authorisation, leaving the broader NRCoT issue unresolved. A full refund was then promptly issued by us, within 2 hours of Raileasy receiving this written authorisation from RDG. We communicated this outcome to Transport Focus, who you had also complained to. We are sorry that your customer service experience was not to your satisfaction, but Raileasy is obliged to follow the regulations as set by its regulator, whatever they may be. We wish you the best in finding an alternative retailer to use, but we would like to point out that the National Rail Conditions of Travel apply industry wide.
