My wife and I will be in London for part of a vacation in May and we’re trying to figure out the Oyster card.
In Montreal I can load a desired number of trips on an Opus card; in Abu Dhabi I can load a desired amount of money on a Hafilat card, but in London it seems that you can only buy from a selection of number-of-days packages.
Is my perception accurate or is there a way of just loading a given value or number of trips? Also, is the Oyster card just for tourists or is it the standard public transit pass in London?
anyone can use it, including locals. When I was there I loaded money on it in pounds and every trip cost a certain amount. When the card used up all the pounds you can load more on it.
It’s just a prepaid travel card, but it works in such way that you will only be charged the cheapest possible amount for the journeys you made - for example if you make a journey in the morning that would only have required a single ticket, then in the afternoon, you zip around a load of different places, the system will only debit the card with the cost of the equivalent travelcard that would have covered both your afternoon’s travel, including the morning (that is, you pay one fare for the day’s travel)
Yes, buy it when you arrive and pre-load it with whatever you think will be sufficient. That will depend on how far out from the centre (Zone one) you plan to travel. Any unused cash, and the deposit on the card, can be reclaimed at the end of your stay.
If you’re planning on visiting several of the more expensive attractions (Eye, Tower, St Paul’s, etc.) you might look into getting a “paper” Travelcard, which entitles you to 2-for-the-price-of-1 admission to them (in addition to giving you unlimited bus and tube travel, at least through certain zones.)
It’s a bit of a PITA, requiring you to jump through some hoops - but we found it worth our while to do it when we were there last year.
(We also got Oyster cards for traveling to outer zones (from/to Heathrow) and for travel outside the 7 days our Travelcards were valid.)
If you have a tap-capable credit card - Visa PayWave or MasterCard Contactless - or Google/Apple Pay don’t even need an Oyster Card. TfL will automatically figure out the daily cap and change your card once each night with the correct amount. We did get a card for my then 11 year old daughter and had it set for the child rate which you can’t do with a Contactless card.
If you do buy an Oyster Card, you can buy a daily package or just put £20 on it and the system will deduct as you travel, taking the daily cap into account.
There’s auto-guichets in most Tube stations where you can load up your Oyster as needed, either by credit card or cash.
When we flew into Gatwick, there was a concierge in the arrivals area, once you were through customs, where you could buy Oysters and also chips for your cell phones. Very handy.
I believe that most credit cards will charge you a transaction fee* every time* you pay for the Tube with it. Also, there may be other reasons to avoid direct credit card payment but I’m sorry, I don’t remember them right now. Maybe something to look into.
Yes, I was thinking it would be advisable to doublecheck with your contactless card provider to see what their charges are for using it abroad - and whether it would pay you to use a contactless debit card rather than credit card, or make one transaction on it to get your local pass/card (whichever you choose) instead. One point to remember is that you need to keep chipped cards separate when putting one near the reader: you don’t want to find yourself checking into the system on one card and out on another, because that will generate a maximum fare charge on both (the great computer in the sky isn’t necessarily clever enough to know both cards belong to the same person).
If you’ve a mind to, you can try to work out how much you might spend from the TfL fare tables (you’d be unlikely to need to travel outside zones 1-2, apart from trips to and from the airports). The daily cap is £6.80 and the weekly cap (same as a 7-day travelcard) is £34.10.
Canadian cards typically don’t have transaction charges, although there is a currency conversion charge of 2.5%. I just came back from Amsterdam and Paris last week and other than €100 that I withdrew from an ATM with my debit card everything else was credit.
If you can do it without bank charges, and if it works, I’d see no reason not to use your contactless credit or debit card to travel. It really is very convenient; no queues.
Well, actually I can see one potential issue - if you want a receipt or physical ticket for some reason (expenses, for example). Other than that, it’s great.
In October 2015, my Canadian Visa credit card (with PayWave) wasn’t accepted for the contactless thing, so I ended up using the same credit card in a dispenser to buy individual tickets (which was all I needed).
Also, bear in mind that you can’t pay using cash on London’s buses, so you will need some kind of plastic. The UK is rapidly heading towards being a cashless society; we haven’t got as far as some Scandinavian countries but card payments overtook cash back in 2014.
One important exception is pay toilets. I actually messaged TfL with the idea to let you use the Oyster card to pay for toilet fees rather than having to lug around a heavy pocketful of change. It would also cut down on the amount of change in the machines so as to make a less inviting theft target.
Although of course there would still need to be a cash option so people don’t resort to public elimination if they don’t have any electronic payment available. My last trip to London I found myself in Hyde Park but the nearest 2 gents’ were completely locked and at the second one someone was desperate enough that they were using the nearby hedge instead.
True, but it still does depend on where; if you’re somewhat rural, or in a smaller shop, you can still easily find places that don’t take plastic, only cash.
OK, my keen sense of “Tube” tells me you’re a Brit, but “guichet” I had to look up and am still perplexed. It’s bad enough you guys say “aubergine” for “eggplant,” – is this really the word everybody uses for “dispensing machine thing?”
Northern Piper is Canadian, but “guichet” seems like an unusual term for an anglophone Canadian to use. I’d use the word “kiosk” or something like that.
Doesn’t the Oyster card start out as a per use card but switch to a daily pass as soon as your charges reach the daily pass cost? This used to be the case.
There’s an Oyster app for smartphones but it doesn’t replace the card. It just lets you check your card balance.
