London is zone based and you need to tap in and out for rail (not busses) so you cannot use the same card for two people.
That doesn’t seem much (and to you it isn’t) but this is a feature built-in to the system.
There are about 20 million people who visit London each year. If each leave $1.50 behind that’s a free $30 million to the city and they are happy to take it.
The actual numbers doubtless differ but I think you can see the benefit to the city.
The one weird trick in Toronto is that it will let you overdraw your card by up to one full fare. I just can’t be bothered even though the money sits with the province until a transit agency bills them for a fare.
I think I would buy an Oyster card and use that every time instead of any contactless or tap-to-pay credit or debit cards or any Google Wallet or Apple Pay simply because I don’t understand any/all of the little cumulative fees those non-Oyster cards/phones might have. But maybe this wouldn’t be an issue at all and I’m just paranoid.
If I lived in London (or anyplace in England, probably) I would feel confident about understanding the various payment systems commonly used in England and how they interact with TfL fares. But for me, using a North American contactless method introduces too many variables and too much potential for overseas small-print hidden fees skullduggery.
I think the problem with using one card for multiple riders is that you might all exit at different stations and there is no way to track those different fares with only one card.
The system works for the underground and buses. There is a well-known method some people use to cheat the system on the train by tapping twice. The computer reads that as start and finish for a local trip, while the fraudulent passenger is travelling to Zone 3 or whatever.
Some get caught and fined, but I guess many get away with it. This is another reason why each person needs their own card.
TfL (link) has a policy in place to prevent this:
If you touch in when you enter a station, and then touch out to exit it within a short period of time, you’ll be charged a same station exit charge. These are:
- Between 0 - 2 minutes: a maximum fare. If you re-enter the same or a different station within 45 minutes, you’ll be refunded. This doesn’t apply if you take a bus or tram before re-entering a station
- Between 2 - 30 minutes: the minimum pay-as-you-go fare from that station
- More than 30 minutes: two maximum fares. We’ll assume two separate journeys have been made and both will be incomplete
We apply these charges to discourage fare evasion.
The TfL computer totals up your journeys and makes just the one total charge in every 24 hours, and never more than a daily cap (according to which zones you travel through).
What your bank charges for overseas transactions is another matter, but bear in mind that you pay a non-refundable fee for an Oyster card to begin with, and you’ll need to do the brainwork of guessing how much you need to put on it before you use it - on which your bank may also charge overseas fees.
This is one gotcha; be careful when following the herd so to speak, as there are a couple of stations with weird layouts and you can be stung for exiting or entering more than once.
It happened to me one time, I think at King’s cross. I went through an exit gate, turned a couple of corners and found…another set of exit gates between me and freedom. The system charged me some kind of default fee, but had I known it would do that I would have asked one of the attendants to let me through the second set of barriers.
My wife and I were in London last year and that’s exactly what we used, no problems at all.
I imagine something out of the Tom Baker years of Doctor Who where he encounters the evil TfL Computer trying to trap people on the Bakerloo Line.
The riders without the card used to tap in wouldn’t be able to tap out if they went to a different station.
Any Hotel recommendations for June? I’m thinking about the Tower Hotel near the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. But might be better off nearly the British Museum.
We stayed for 2 nights near the British Museum, and on our way back through London stayed near Trafalgar Square. We found London to be easy to get around, and quite walkable - but you’ll want to just make a quick map of the things you want to see and do, and pick something in the middle of them (we don’t like staying in the outskirts and having to travel back when we’re already tired). Also, there’s a pretty wide spectrum of hotel quality wherever you choose.
The choice of hotels really depends on what you want to do. If you want to be really close to sights I wouldn’t go near Tower Bridge - in addition to the Tower and the bridge, you’ll have the City nearby, but many of the most famous post-medieval sights that you’d associate with London (Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Soho, Regent Street, the West End, Buckingham Palace…) are actually not there but rather further west, in Westminster. Also, the City can get very, very quiet in the evening and on weekends - nightlife is elsewhere. Of course it doesn’t really make a difference if you don’t mind taking public transportation from your hotel to your destination.
I recommend the British Museum Out-of-hours tours to spend some time before the crowds arrive. We had alone time with the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone in peace and quiet one morning, highly recommended.
So I’m now looking for Hotels near The British Museum, probably south of it.
Is Soho or Trafalgar a better area to stay?
I certainly don’t mean to dominate the thread with my experiences, and I know there are plenty of more seasoned London travelers and residents. But if I were to do it again, I’d stay in the SoHo/Covent Garden area if I could find a suitable hotel. We found that area charming and full of activities and restaurants. Trafalgar was also nice and busy.
Last year my brother stayed near Trafalgar, and it was fine. The neighborhood is very busy. We stayed in Islington, near the Caledonian Road tube station, and it was much more residential.
A tip, follow the tube and train lines out from the areas you want to visit to find places to stay. Someplace may be two or three stops away, and save you a considerable amount per night. In other cases, things may seem close, but very inconvenient by public transport. For example, I’d originally found a place west of Battersea, but it turned out it would have taken an hour, with multiple changes to get to my conference in Holborn.
We stayed at the Morgan Hotel, right around the corner from the British Museum. Small rooms, but clean and a great breakfast, and well located.
Thanks everyone.