I've been commuting into London for the last 5 years on trains. I put in delay repay claims each month that average about £50 compensation. Annoyingly, South Western Railway (when they were South West Trains) used to not use Delay repay and instead used void days to compensate season ticket holders. So every few months, or at the end of a year of season ticket ownership, you could simply walk up to a ticket office person and ask for any refunds due to poor service. They would then refund you a load in one whack. Some years this would be hundreds of pounds. You didn't have to think about it.
With delay repay, you are forced to fill in an online form for EVERY. SINGLE. JOURNEY. This is a deliberate effort to shaft season ticket holders and reduce the compensation paid out because people simply cba to fill them in daily. It's effort and mind numbing. The online forms are deliberately slow to fill in and do not save any of your information. They also include captcha checks. They marketed it as being great and fair to be a part of the industry standard delay repay scheme, when in all honesty this is only good for people buying daily or one off tickets that faced delays. They also reject a lot of claims, stating that the "delay was less than 15 minutes" when it wasn't by their clocks. The new "auto delay repay" is also a joke and very limited.
The cost of my ticket annually is over 5k. The service has become worse than ever since South West Trains became South Western Railway a couple of years ago. It will rise again in January. Despite all this SWR have had strikes on numerous occasions over the last year and we are currently facing a 27 day strike where a "reduced timetable" is in effect to cover this strike period. What this translates to is that if you are lucky, trains run about half the time, but they are often short formed and absolutely packed. Like, dangerously packed. Delays and cancellations are to be expected and you can't claim anything for this other than normal delay repay based only on the temporary timetable put in place.
It's all about the profit. There is no incentive to provide a good service. It's a captive market.
The pricing is such that it is always beneficial to buy an annual season ticket if you are a regular commuter, even if you work from home once or twice a week. In fact, for most people it would only start to save money when buying daily tickets, if you work from home 3 times out of your 5 day week. i.e. You only travel twice. Which nobody can realistically do in most office jobs.
The ticket pricing is still overly complex, restrictive and unintelligent.
In an ideal world, tickets pricing would be fairer and allow us to pocket savings when not actually using the lines. This would encourage less travel and more remote working easing commuter congestion slightly.
I looked at getting a motorbike again to commute but the savings aren't all that significant unless buying an extremely economic (slow and boring) bike. You have to worry about all sorts of other faff, like your gear, clothing, showers, your safety, the wet/icey/cold mornings and nights. I've done it before and swore I'd never do it again unless the time savings were super significant.
