Delay, Repay, Repeat

          As our train approached Paddington station, twenty-nine minutes behind schedule, there was a palpable sense of anticipation among some of the passengers. This was due, not to the excitement of arriving in London, but to the possibility of getting monetary compensation for the delay. One more minute and we would qualify, on the sliding scale, for a 50% refund of our fare.

          The driver, of course, knew this. The question tormenting us was, would he side with the hopeful claimants and slow down a bit so that we could hit the half-hour jackpot, or was he a loyal company man striving to save his employer money by speeding up and limiting us to the mere 25% that applies for delays of up to fifteen minutes?

          There are, of course, relatively few travellers who would relish arriving late and getting some money back. The majority will have connections to make, appointments to keep and urgent business to conclude at their destinations. For them, time is money too – but in a negative way. For those of us with a laid-back lifestyle, the game is different.

          I travel by train frequently enough to have an idea of how often the ‘delay repay’ scheme kicks in. I am also well versed in the intricacies of a claim process designed to flummox the first timer and frustrate the faint-hearted. The last compensation I received was 100%, even though it was not really the operator’s fault that we were delayed for over an hour. There had been an incident involving the emergency services that screwed up the timetable for hundreds of journeys in the Somerset region. How do train operators factor this sort of phenomenon into their pricing structure? Considering, also, that there are the nine types of national 30% discount card and innumerable regional schemes offering similar benefits, it’s something of a mystery to me how train operators make a significant profit. Are there sufficient people prepared to pay the full price of a ‘walk on’ fare and subsidise the rest of us?

          Nor is this system unique to Britain. The last time we were in Italy, I noticed that train journeys there featured so many routine announcements urging passengers to claim compensation for delays that one speculated as to whether there was a Mafia scam involved. Making a claim, however, was forbidding for us foreigners. The online procedure was in the native tongue – naturally – and way too complex for my linguistic ability. So, since we are planning to travel by train to spend a few weeks in Naples over Christmas and New Year, I have decided to brush up on the lingo, using the free version of an app.

          The app is effective. It is also clever, in that it knows when you’ve skipped a day’s practice and emails you a useful reminder – though that last part may spook the paranoid. Speaking of which, the lessons so far have been focussed on finding one’s way to a railway station and asking about trains. Now, I had no choice of lesson topic, so it may just be a coincidence that airports don’t come up, but I sense the tentacles of Google at work. Who told Google about the trains? Was it Airbnb? Was it the payment platform we used to buy train tickets? Was this information valuable to the app in some way that I have yet to fathom?

          Anyway, I’m on day six of the lesson program and getting a little weary of repeating Dov’è la Stazione ferroviaria, per favore? Surely, it’s time to move on to “How do I claim delay repay, please?” Maybe that’s not included in the free version of the app and I will have to cough up some cash. No worries: our train driver obliged by arriving thirty one minutes late at Paddington, so I could use the refund I’m expecting.