Contactless Fares Can Be Cheaper Than Oyster
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- It's publicised that if you use contactless to pay for travel in London, it's the same price as using an Oyster card. But that's not always the case. We went onto the tube, and made identical journeys using the two different methods of payment to prove what happens, and show you why it does.
Huge thanks as always to Mike Whitaker and his website 'Oyster Rail' full of invaluable information on payment and fares, go and have a look at: www.oyster-rail...
Note: If you have a railcard discount (or similar) applied to your Oyster that will always be cheaper than contactless. Discounts cannot be applied to contactless payment cards.
For more details on capping, including how Contactless has automatic weekly capping (and Oyster doesn't) that's here on the TfL website: tfl.gov.uk/far...
after algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, linear algebra, combinatorics, differential equations ........ here comes travel in uk....
Funny, I just came from college math as well
Yeh train travel in the uk is a complicated science.
@@milkandduckrailway323 the really advance part is evading fares
Are they offering college courses on this?! For credit?! -- ha, ha
@@heleneg525
to reggae music Gregory Isaac
I remember comparing my oyster journey to a brother's contactless and was surprised to find he paid less. It's this aspect of travelling on public transport that I hate: never knowing if you are paying too much or not.
I only travel to London once or twice a month and always use Contactless because I'm too lazy to top up my Oyster. Makes me happy that laziness is saving me money!
The government shall be pleased with you considering they are working overtime to get people to agree to a cashless society, which means even more surveillance and maybe even a social credit system attached to digital payment like they have in China. So, don't be "lazy", question more.
@@bliss448You’re forgetting that cash has as much value as digital currency, and with how much surveillance in the modern age, you can track cash
You can buy a railcard! RT777E from TrainPal 😊
Even though I’m 3 years late, I just wanna say that this video was definitely needed and really VERY necessary for people to know... thanks!
kingrapid never too late
I specialize in finding discounts you wouldn’t believe! Feel free to ask me for shopping tips anytime.
If you have a railcard, say 16-25, then your daily off-peak cap is 1/3 lower, for example, £8.45 instead of £12.8 for zone 1-6 (2019). This cap apply to any kind of public transport. Railcards cannot be loaded to contactless so oyster is the only way to utilize this discount
Isn't this for off peak?
WOW--- really interesting video guys. Can't believe how much of a price difference it was!
You actually get free journeys with contactless because you don't have to top up.
Daredevil not really, because you have to "top up" at your bank
You prolly dont care at all but does any of you know a tool to get back into an instagram account?
I was stupid forgot my login password. I appreciate any help you can offer me!
@Caleb Antonio Instablaster =)
Is there anything in the universe as complicated as TfL's fares?
in Hamburg, no one understands either 😂😂😋😂😂 😊
national rail fares
Fares for public transport in Germany in general 😁
It's so fucked up
@@fly89Hamburg is way eaised
I always thought that TFL should have a day fare finder, where you can add multiple journeys and see how much you'll pay.
They got it now. Is this video still true today?
It caps out so why does it matter
would be good to have an answer from TFL
sadly contactless cannot give me national rail card discount which is 1/3 off. so to younger persons, oyster is defo cheaper
wow london has some expensive public transport
Yes because it needed a large-scale upgrade programme covering many decades due to a growing population. Someone has to pay for it.
I think TfL fares in London are good value, you can ride all day unlimited in zones 1 and 2, on tubes buses and Docklands trains, for a max of £7.00 Under 11s free, and 11-15s can get half fare added to Oyster card, Night buses too, Try using transport outside London, that really is expensive.
i agree
london is cheap especially sadiq kahn hopper fare
Under 15s aren't free. I only got a half price 24hr discount when I went when I was 13.
Skelly I live in London and the Under 15's fare is free
There is one huge advantage of oyster over contactless that you are not considering... You can't add any discount to contactless.. if you have a railcard for example using oyster might be much cheaper.. you have discounted off peak travels and even lower off peak caps, for instance if you travel in zone 1/2 the cap is just over 4£
I have noticed that contactless is cheaper than oyster and i have been scratching my head trying to figure out why that is. i regularly travel into Euston from Watford Junction (a mixture of peak and off peak). my peak fare is capped at £14.70 (on oyster it costs £16.60) and if i make one journey off peak, one peak it is capped at £12.50 (oyster would cost £13.4). i didn't understand why, but have been happy about it!
I would use contactless if I could load my student oyster benefits onto it.
That's coming in the next few years, as well as linking Travelcards to Contactless.
Londons fare is atrocious. In Athens I pay less than a euro for my commute on the train.
A common misconception is the Number of zones you travel through equates to same fare. If I make an Underground trip from Hornchurch zone 6 to Whitechapel zone 2. It costs the same as going from West Croydon zone 5 overground to Whitechapel. Hornchurch is 1 more zones away from Whitechapel through the district line. Both trips same price
oyster doesn't have a weekly cap as it were, but it has weekly travelcards, which i guess are the same price. if you want to travel outside the zone you have your travelcard is for you need to top up, whereas contactless just charges you removing the extra step, but it still is a facility oyster has. also, given how "zone centric" everyone is in London, i doubt they'd ever go out of their travelcard area to have to worry about topping up.
what contactless doesn't have is a monthly cap and oyster has this. if you're as bad at managing money as i am you might prefer paying for your monthly ticket at the beginning of the month when you have money rather than spending it as you go and realise you can't afford to get to work halfway through the month because you've spent it.
saying all that, i now cycle which is "free" ( i put it in quotes because you need to buy a bike, a lock and pay for the occasional maintenance) so when i do use the tube (raining, too cold, going drinking, etc) i use contactless as oyster is just a card i'd have to faff around with
So glad I swapped out to contactless last year now! Good to know!
Interesting outcome. Will TfL be addressing this, or will we be more likely to ditch our Oyster cards in favour of our contactless cards?
It might be cheaper for TLF to go for contactless. They will still need to make oyster cards but they maybe able to spend less on them if they can rely on the banks
That might be an idea but there are quite a lot of people who do not like to use contactless or the bank will not give them a contactless card (like me before i changed account types) and you also have tourists that would like to travel and an oyster card is the easiest way to do that instead of trying to explain a paper ticket or anything else it just put money on it with these machines and tap in and go :)
Oyster allows National Railcards to be registered on the card, such as Senior, 16-25, Disabled and the Young Visitor Discount, contactless does not, Oyster-cards will need to be retained to allow these concessions.
Or just allow concessions to be applied to contactless cards?
That won't happen, because the banks would have to let TFL load data onto their cards and they won't.
Wow thanks for the info! Is this still the case in Sep 2019?
Omg glad i found this video 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 Going to London this week for the first time ever and this Def will help me out. I guess no oyster card for me 😞
Thanks for this videos as it helped me save on a journey thru zone 1 while I was visiting London for a weekend
Plus, if you have a cashback contactless credit card, you can save up to a further 5% on the ticket price.
What card gives you cashback?
@@chubeye1187 American Express cashback credit card. Just remember to pay off the balance in full each month, or all your cashback will be cancelled out by interest.
@@ethelthecat1 but you can also pay for your oyster balance with your credit card so by paying more with that you get more cashback :P
Do contact less vs oyster while touching two pink readers.
Stavros Evokhamun Which One's Cheaper
Why do I seem to be watching so many videos about London, England from here in Canada?!
@SineYi But I would need thousands of dollars to go to England.
unless you have a disabled persons railcard (or any other railcard of course)
Borrowed a friend's Oyster card when visiting UK last year. But then a cousin told me to use contactless and not bother with Oyster. Worked a treat. Won't bother with Oyster again (a bucket list item of mine is Reading to Shenfield assuming they get it running before I start pushing daisies).
has this been updated for 2020? what happens with apple pay? does the same principle apply?
0:50 Not talking on the tube. Well done.
Ah. This is most interesting. I discovered this discrepancy last August.
I don't think I have full journey history but I posted the below on a london transport related forum but didn't get a response. This was starting in zone 1 and going out to zone 6 and back. So it works both ways!
>>>
I thought oyster and contactless were meant to cost the same (apart from a 7 day cap on cards that is not available on oyster).
Yet when I was in London last weekend, I was travelling with a friend, exactly the same journeys, which included going out to zone 6 (Ruislip) and back. Yet my travel on contactless was capped at 9.80 (which is the cost of zones 1-4) and my friend wasn't capped until 12.50 (which is what I expected to pay for 1-6). There was some bus journeys as well so whether I've come across a rare bug I don't know.
I did wonder if the cost would change before being formally charged, but no, 9.80 has appeared on my statement now.
Great video, as usual, have spent many hours watching your videos, keep up the good work
However, you can apply railcard discount on oyster and not contactless. If you travel off peak a lot, oyster will almost always be cheaper assuming you have a railcard
Shame, the discount is only applicable for photocard Oyster, not visitor Oyster.
No, I have a normal blue oyster card and if you ask the staff at a station, they can apply it on for you
Richard Wang Oh thank you very much Rich. I'll do it next time I visit London again. :)
Zoey Nguyen thx For sharing this information which is very helpful as I'm in London right now n I travel between zone 1n 3 quite regularly...
My journey from Cannon Street to Chafford Hundred (via Tower Hill) was cheaper on Contactless compared to the identical journey made on Oyster
January 2020 I spent &112 on contacteless, if I had the monthly bus pass on oyster I would have saved £30,00 as monthly bus pass cost £81. This add also should alert any oyster or contacteless users on the tube about fines on when touching your cards in and out preferably with a hammer as their conveniently machines does play a lot of tricks. TFL is out there to make buckets on all the different ways they charge one trip from another.
Might be true for a travel card, but if traveling if with an Oyster card with a Railcard on it, and single/return journey will probably be cheaper on oyster. This is very interesting tho, thanks
Is this still accurate or has TFL corrected the difference?
We all should follow Luxemburg's example : free public transport everywhere. It's not only about the money, it's also the ease of use : no need to torture your mind comparing price schemes, wondering whether your card will work, what to do about the child... Just hop into the bus/tram/train, and off you go.
Also, all these thousands of electricity-consuming barriers and machines become irrelevant, and there's no need to pay for their construction, maintenance and energy consumption.
How does the contactless system work. Do you need to download a specific app for it to register your journeys. Also for contactles after how many journies does it cap and become free.
Anønymøus Víds register you’re contactless debit or credit card on the oyster TfL app, when you travel on the tube just tap it on the yellow oyster pads at the start and end of your journey.
Great video.
Have you looked at the monthly or weekly oyster to see if they are better worse or equal to contactless? Or maybe found a threshold of journeys between the two which would favour the one or the other?
Everytime I travelled from Heathrow, to Croydon in zone 6, it was only about £5 something. I think there is a time limit, that lets you travel for one price, if you change trains in a certain time period.
It's a shame that contactless doesn't have monthly or annual caps as well because at the moment an annual oyster is much much cheaper than contactless and you get the golden rail card on top of it. It seems there's a lot of pushing to get people to move towards contactless, but Oyster is still cheaper if you don't use it as pay as you go.
Agreed. hopefull monthly and annual caps will come to Contactless at somepoint though. If you're using Oyster for adult PAYG journies though, you're better off using Contactless.
I thought this seemed expensive for tourists but all the tourist attractions are in zone one and two which have a £6.50 cap
right?
Sam 1 sadly tourists purchase paper tickets rather than get an oyster- the tickets are much more expensive than an oyster. Basically TfL scam either unsuspecting or uninformed tourists
The Transport Guide what I did in London was, because I had to get national rail then underground, I got a ticket that was return from weyebridge to Waterloo and a zone 1-6 travel card which was only 12.50
If you have a railcard here is the trick:
During morning peak train from Euston to Watford Jn will cost less if you use Oyster. (£8.3 v £10.2)
The same holds true during the offpeak. (£3.5 v £6.75)
However, there is no evening peak on the National Rail network, but there is one on the TfL, so between 16 and 19 on the weekdays Anytime Single ticket costs less (£6.75 v £8.3).
Does it make sense? No. Can you save enough money for a cup of coffee by knowing that? Yes.
Interesting stuff! I'm using an adult PAYG Oyster with at 16-25 Railcard linked to it, which reduced the daily caps! As soon as I turn 25 and my Railcard expires, I'm moving to contactless!
We would recommend that Tom, yes! If you are paying full adult PAYG fares .. . use Contactless!
Shame that whenever I visit London the queue to ticket office to top up using my railcard discount is unbearable. 😂 Ended up using contactless bank card.
MTA New York City subway and if you continue the journey by Using Bee Line line bus to White Plains,NY via Wakefield 241st Street subway station from Manhattan midtown Times Square or E train & Nice Bus to Hicksville Nassau County via Jamaica Parsons Archer Boulevard $2.75 within two hours
Isn't that the additional expenses reversed by Oyster? Did you check?
Is this STILL true, three and a half years later??
Exactly thats what u wonder
What a useful video, guys! Will be watching more
If you travel between Harrow-on-the-Hill and Baker Street is it the same price if you travel with Chiltern Railways to Marylebone then get the Bakerloo rather than going direct on the Met?
Saying that contactless payment cards are the future isn't particularly smart in case of public transport. Sure they have their benefits, but something like Oyster has more public transport-centric upsides, especially for people outside of the "comes to the City of London for work once or twice a week" demographic. What would be much more useful is a smartphone app for reader-to-smartphone Oyster, similar to how there is Android Pay for regular payments.
How safe are we with TFL with all our Bank details in their Data Base... just a Matter of time
As safe as using it at a shop really
Could still be cheaper with a railcard applied to your oystercard, you get 1/3 off tube journeys
It's contactless cheaper after 10am? I travel Watford to West End.
Without reading other posts, please calculate this over a monthly period. Contactless only caps on a weekly basis. If you purchase a 1-6 monthly trave card and you make the same journey mon-fri, over the course of that month you will pay Less on Oyster. But don't take my word for it, please look into it yourself.
lmao. Always knew this and dumped oyster as I always noticed it came up cheaper for expensive journeys.
How about if we travel outside zone 6 from zone 4 and return?
so nice that here in NYC we have no fare zones.
Sure but you also have the metro system of a third world country - perhaps even worse! There are pretty much no escalators anywhere so you have to drag your suitcase up the stairs. The platforms are awful, paint peeling, no visible live schedule information in easy view, cabling just strung up like in a slum, no maps on the actual platforms and then it's like a treasure hunt to even find (the one and only) map in the whole damn station. That's what I remember about your the apparently 'nice' no fare zone metro system in NYC LOL
I went to other cities, Chicago/SF and they all were far inferior to any basic but still more sophisticated transport system available in Europe lol
Yes. It's simple and doesn't give you a headache
***** well I guess you could say we get what we pay for. I really love the rustic felling of the system although there are some stations that really get neglected. Also express service really saves people time in the outer Burroughs. one question I have is how do you guys deal with non air-conditioned cars???
The same way we deal with no AC in our homes. Go to SF and ask them the same thing. The weather doesn't really get to the same degree as NY. It pretty much rains and is overcast here a lot of the time. They do have large fans in some stations and all the new upgraded trains have AC in them, contrary to what you may believe - most of the lines have now been upgraded.
***** Simple? You have stations that have the same name (Lorimer Ave springs to mind as I got off at what I thought was the right one, was the other one 2 miles down the road), lines with the same colours, no maps on the platforms so you have no idea whether you need to go up or downtown. Totally illogical and consumer unfriendly!
It’s true what they used to say in the old American Express ads: don’t leave home without it.
if you were to visit all the tube stations in a fastest time record attempt- how much would it cost? (don't worry I'm not after your record) I'm just wodering if you would be charged for every station/ every time you went in or out of a zone or just once for each zone- as long as its the same journey?
you'd buy an all-zones, all-day paper ticket which currently costs £21. you wouldn't use Oyster/Contactless ...
***** of course!- my apologies, that was very dim!! i found your video's yesterday, I'm afraid i am not yet a 'transport geek'- and nor do i live in london :)
I'm quoting from his website:
"You'll need to buy a paper ticket for the day - An adult peak day Zone 1-9 travel costs £21.50. Oyster cards / Contactless are not recommended as they time out after a while (e.g. 90 minutes) and you'll get an error at the gateline as you'll have spent too long underground in-between touching in and touching out . Using a paper ticket means you won't have any problems with this. You can buy a ticket in advance too - you don't have to wait until the morning itself, which will save you time."
I'm spending 3 days travelling the tube at the end of the month. I've signed up to contactless and I'll use it for a day, with pre-purchased travelcards for the other days. I'm highly dubious of getting screwed if I forget to scan out or not scan a pink terminal or if I make multiple changes (I will be doing Tube Challenges) in a short space of time.
Thanks Geoff. I'm going to be doing the Zone 1, "Bottle", All Lines and A-Z (not strictly for times - I just want to do them!) but worried that doing multiple visits to Farringdon for the All Lines might catch me out!
These videos are absolutely brilliant! SUBSCRIBED!
This video is a year old. Is there not a daily cap on Oyster travel now?
Interesting.
On a related note, what happens with contactless cards vs Apple Pay/Android Pay linked to the same card? Does it link together on the fares side or count separately? If I used Android Pay for one journey, and the contactless card itself for another, would they count towards the same cap? If not, could I use my card and lend my payment enabled phone to a friend to use to travel together, or would it throw a fit for the same account to be used twice?
Contactless and Apple/Android Pay are slightly different. For security, Apple/Android Pay 'masks' your actual card details and uses different card details to what your actual card details are when paying. For example, if your card ends with the digits 1234, if you use Apple/Android Pay then your card details get 'masked' and the system will see your card as 5678 instead (or whatever 'fake' card details you get when you sign up to Apple/Android Pay). If you just used your original contactless card then it would see your 'real' card details, and the system would recognize your card as the one ending 1234. Therefore this means you cannot combine the two methods, as the system sees them as completely different things and cannot tell if they are related.
So thats why when I visited London in December I had to keep topping up my girlfriends Visitor Oyster card all the time and wondering why when thinking what I had originally put on there should have been enough for the entire trip, when without even looking at individual charges and comparing my contactless, I knew my contactless was being cheaper than the oyster, but hadn't a clue why. My girlfriend really needs to get a contactless card then for the next time we visit London haha
I have found an issue like this when traveling from Shenfield. Oyster was cheaper but now with zone 9 (I think) it caps at a 9 zone travel card, and that costs more than a paper ticket. That said I called up and they refunded no problem, and allegedly they automatically refund regular commuters who lose out every day. Next time I am down in London I will give contactless a try at see if it works unless someone beats me to it.
Also the Tyne and Wear Metro have the same problem where it can be cheaper to buy two paper tickets than use the Pop (Northern version of an Oyster) card. The difference is they are trying to pretend the problem does not exist. You can not use contactless on the Metro other than to buy tickets and top up Pop cards.
The Contactless backend system is far more advanced than Oyster so it wouldnt surprise me if it could handle it. A person with a British contactless bank card has no reason to use Oyster unless they put weekly, monthly or yearly travelcard on it.
or unless they have a discount entitlement (eg railcard).
For the weekly capping of contactless, if I travel most of the time in zone1-2 during the week but will take one or two trips to zone 4, how will the weekly cap account for? Will it cap at zone 1-2 and charge the extension fee from zone 2 to zone 4? or will it cap at zone 1-zone 4 for the weekly price?
This is so interesting! Does anyone know if now, 2 years after this video was published, this is still the case?
If I use the overground and tube it’s the same price except from zone 4 to zone 2 off peak... on the tube it’s £1:50 but on the overground it’s 1:90
Rather good actually... More please.
What about the oyster card that most students have, which is linked to our 16-25 railcards and will be charged 1/3 cheaper on all journeys?
Hi Geoff and Matt my wife and I are Aussie's with a Travel Oyster cards for when we visit London. As we use the underground and Bus network extensively thoughout zone 1-2 but also transfer into London from Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line are you saying that if we were to use contactless payments we would be better off? I know that this video is a couple of years old I would be interested in some feedback as we are heading your way in August 2019.
You arrived yet.
You make a Tube walk (visit all the stations) with the two modes of payment and then tell which one is cheaper..
One day I touched in my Oyster at a DLR station and the DLR wasn't working.
I had to walk home (one hour but not much longer than the bus journey or overground + tube, the only alternatives).
This wasn't the the first time but is the first time I've checked to I've realize that I paid £7.70 (for Incomplete journey DLR to [No touch-out])
After speaking with a customer service almost daily for more than a week, I have finally received a partial refund of £4.80.
Can you find out why this waste of time and money?
I know this is silly because I am in a bus-driven American City, but across the city is $4.00 for us and back and $2.00 or $2.50 for each trip after, unless you use a no-limit card for $20 per week. I want to visit London though when I save enough money and it seems that even one day of trips on the Tube would be easily 20 pounds---in a real quick explanation, how does capping work? If I had a job in Zone 1 and lived in Zone 6 or 7, would it really cost 70 pounds a week to commute?
You can get weekly travel cards that you put on the oyster it works out cheaper, not a lot cheaper I might add but cheaper but you can use these on the tube and on national rail (between the zones you bought) and also for the price it gives you unlimited free bus and tram use anywhere, the link I have put down here content.tfl.gov.uk/adult-fares.pdf is the PDF to the price of all the TfL caps for Pay As You Go and for Travel Cards and one more thing you can get a visitor oyster card that you can use for however long you stay in London.
Hope this helps :)
So I’m coming from Sydney and visiting London for the first time. Is that right, I can just tap my American Express Card through all the stations even from Heathrow to Cockfosters?
Yes. It is not to make a favour to you guys. It for people's to give up to oyster and use contactless. So they can track everybody when they want. Will see in the future.
Can't they just update the oyster system to be identical to contactless apart from the design of the actual card? I'm not a londoner, and I have never used oyster so I don't really know it.
That forms part of the TfL "Future Ticketing Programme", the first two phases of which covered the rollout of Contactless acceptance. Current estimates are December 2016 for Phase 3 (introduction of a new mobile ticketing app) and December 2017 for Phase 4 (Weekly capping on Oyster).
That's what they are doing, but it's not a simple task. It's going to happen within 1-3 years.
What is the answer of TFL as they are advertising something different???
so - next time in london I need a travel advisor... - so is there a kind of week ticket? or intelligent ticket like oyster seems? Or would it be always cheaper to directly use contactless payment with mastercard?
Unfortunately it appears you can't add a Railcard to contactless. So with Railcard oyster would be cheaper.
Thank you for the explanation. I've been wondering about this for ages. What's the point of Oyster?
You can get travel passes on oyster or apply a 16-25 or 26-30 railcard to an oyster giving you 1/3 off journeys off peak
Really good if you're less than 30yo
Or older than 60
If a person travelled off peak on oyster from zone 6 to zone 2, zone 2 to zone 1, capped the journey cost to £6.50, and then did zone 1 to zone 2, having still hit the cap, and then gone from zone 2 back to zone 6, would it be £9.50 on oyster or not???
so contactless could be any payment card ? also do you need to swipe out the contactless card when exiting the tube ?
If you have an eligible railcard and add it to your Oyster then the Oyster should always be cheaper. Hopefully they'll introduce a weekly cap for Oyster soon. Or now...
Except I have a 16-25 railcard attached to my Oyster (that you can't add to a contact-less card), which allows me to save 1/3 on off-peak journeys...
Yup! : "Note: If you have a railcard discount (or similar) applied to your Oyster that will always be cheaper than Contactless. Discounts cannot be applied to Contactless payment cards."
Why is nothing ever simple?
never understood what off-peak means... i’m in london right now for the third time in my life and trying to educate myself about transportation fares because i’m spending too much
The video is 3:40 long and the peak time Zone 1-2 fare is £3.40… was that a coincidence?
I use the bus a lot and buy a monthly fare for this
I rarely use the underground but when I do would it be advisable to use my contactless card rather than topping up my oyster card?
I enjoyed watching it.
What are contactless options for travelers from the United States? Will Android Pay work?
You can use Android Pay, although depending on your bank and whether they charge a percentage or flat fee for small international transactions it might make it a lot more costly, as I don't think it groups together payments when you reach the daily cap. Oyster cards can be bought for £5 and topped up using a single card payment or cash.
Jared Bowhay-Pringle contactless charges you one total at the end of the day, whether you reach the cap or not.
So tell me if I'm wrong. We SHOULD now use our contacless card instead, wright?
If you are an adult without a railcard discount, we would always used Contactless instead of Oyster for Pay As You Go fares, yes.
Is this still applicable? I’m in London next week for a few days for the first time and just want to use my bank card if it’s still as good an option as oyster.
Why does Geoffs Oyster looks like it looks? Never seen it before.
My Oyster Card is linked to my Disabled Persons Railcard, so I get a third off my TFL Rail Fares, If I link both my Debit Cards to my Railcard? That would be the Fair Thing for TFL to allow me to do.
I've stopped using my Oyster card after I had a load of issues with it in the past and "made do" with contactless.
Glad to see that was the right decision. I will often go in via Morden/Wimbledon and then jet around Z1, so would expect similar things happening here.
Do the zone caps work in the same way on NR/Overground services?
If you play with the boats on a day out, do the strange fares there make Oyster and contactless balance out?
Thank you for that.
I'm still trying to figure out the difference between the two. Why can't TfL just decide on one option and stick with it?! (sadly, you're getting too much like us Americans!). Anyway, every time I visit London, the payment method for the Tube changes. In 2009 I purchased for a fixed fee (around 45 pounds) a seven-day Travelcard/Oyster card that allowed me unlimited travel during those days, whether I took a dozen rides or 100 -- I never had to top up! This May, the TfL customer service assistant told me that I had to add an amount to my Travelcard before travel, and when that amount was used up, I'd have to top up. I never got to the "top up" point, but wasn't sure what would happen if I did. Would the gates simply not open? Would I get a warning before that "You will need to top up before your next ride?" Now, there are contactless cards, which -- I think -- are basically debit and credit cards with a symbol on them. But our cards in the US don't have such a symbol. So, how do visitors get around this, Geoff. Please advise before my next trip and keep me from going crazy! Many thanks!
Oyster Pay as you go still works
Oyster travelcard (prepaid , unlimited) works
Contactless works too.
Many options
@@monzy911 Thank you.
how do they tell which payment method you use
I have a problem. I sent y
my 5 oyster cards more than a month ago and I still have no news about the refund. I'm from Spain and I don't know what to do. I can't call because I don't know how to speak English. Help plis
I live in Australia and usually use an Oyster card when in London. Would my Aussie bank card work in the Tube? It has Mastercard Paypass.
I'd have the same query, I have an Australian Issued Bank card. I believe it wouldn't work though, because your funds in your account would need to be in pounds, not AUD.
Some Australian card work, some don't. 28 Degrees cards work fine. Citi Plus cards don't. I think my niece said her NAB card worked too. I've not used my Oyster card on my last two London visits, I just used my 28 Degrees Mastercard instead.
Beware foreign exchange transaction charges from your bank, though.
you can pay with your bank debit card in the UK so probably use it here as well
You might be able to, but you will probably get charged conversion fees as you will be charged in a different currency than to what your card is. Unless you have one of those 0% conversion fee credit cards like we have here in the UK, then you may be OK. But in some cases it may cheaper to buy a paper ticket/use oyster due to conversion rates. Also for contactless, all your journeys and final price are added up at the end of the day so you would get charged one final fee instead of loads of separate transactions like oyster.
do commbank cards work? and how much would they charge me if i bought something in a supermarket? i dont want to switch back to only using cash on my trip to london
It looks like the Oyster Visitor card tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/visiting-london/visitor-oyster-card has a lower daily cap than the standard Oyster card. Would this give you a similar daily cost to the contactless card option, assuming you are visiting for leisure outside of peak hours?
No, on that page it says that standard daily cap for a Visitor Oyster for Zones 1-2 is £6.50, which is the same for a regular Oyster card (and Contactless card!)
Thanks, Understood