Just the Ticket(s)
26 December 2021
“Sorry, I don’t know what that ticket is.”
I’ve heard words to this effect from bus drivers three times during my recent travels. Maybe there are just too many tickets and ticket types available?
I actually have a national bus pass that I carry everywhere. It allows me to travel on almost any bus, anywhere in Britain, and beyond. No restrictions by day or route. Express services, morning peaks, park-and-rides, nights, England, Scotland, Wales, further afield. And I can use trains, trams, boats…
Sounds too good to be true? Depends on your perspective. I never said it was a free ticket. My national ticket has a 16-digit number on it and most people would call it a contactless debit card. But I can use it to buy tickets for travel almost anywhere nowadays!
Card Payments Accepted
One of the good things to have come out of Covid has been the wider take-up by operators of card payments. I have been able to use my bus pass / contactless debit card for nearly all of my bus rides in 2021. Saves travelling with a pocketful of coins.
There are some wonderfully good value day tickets available across Britain’s bus network, and some of my trips have been entirely based around the services I can use with a ticket covering a specific area or operator, such as a day trip I took on Swindon’s Bus Company last Spring.
ABOVE: Swindon Bus Company’s 2782 at the Orbital Shopping Park on Saturday 1st May 2021. A day ticket for this operator currently costs £4.20.
I don’t have room to talk about all the good deal tickets I have found, but the Discovery Ticket, valid across large swathes of South-East England must get a mention, as must the £10 Day Ticket that Transdev provides across its northern operations – buy it on a Keighley bus and use it on Burnley services as well.
Most of the larger operators offer tickets across an operating area. I was hugely impressed by the Arriva North West and Wales ticket, at £21 for seven days; this defined many of my trips during my stay in Birkenhead. There was a cheaper £18 version available that didn’t cover Wales. I had to make sure that I went into Wales during my stay, and I ended up having a lovely day out, effectively for £3.
Know the Range
But I do expect drivers to know their ticket ranges. I boarded a 500 Arriva bus in Watford for a trip to Aylesbury a few years ago and asked for a “Shires Day Ticket”. I had found on it the (old) Arriva website. It was valid across the whole of the Arriva The Shires network.
The driver didn’t have a clue what the ticket was and initially issued me with a child ticket. I realised later that he had probably heard “Shires” as “Child”. But he didn’t challenge me as to my entitlement for a Child ticket. I never looked like a child, even when I was 15! I was frequently challenged then, to the point that I started carrying my birth certificate around – no Child Oysters then.
In August I tried to buy an Arriva Day West Yorkshire ticket from the driver of a 446 bus in Leeds. I was heading for a day out on the Arriva buses in, erm, West Yorkshire. The driver had never heard of the ticket and sold me a (more expensive) 'M Ticket', which turned out to be a multi-operator ticket for the same region.
This set a flurry of thoughts running round my mind. One – the driver’s lack of knowledge cost Arriva some revenue, as revenue for this ticket would presumably have to be shared with other operators in the region. For an operator-specific ticket, the company would have kept all of the revenue.
Two – why didn’t this driver know about what must surely been a major ticket in his range?
Three – how had I spent five days travelling the buses of West Yorkshire and not heard of the 'M Ticket'?
Four – I wasn’t restricted to Arriva as expected – I could deviate to other operators. That’s how I ended up on the Team Pennine bus from Wakefield to Holmfirth, which I stumbled across by chance a moment before it was due to leave; I used some First buses later that day as well!
The Wrong Stagecoach
The epic fail for me, as far as ticketing is concerned, happened when I boarded a Stagecoach Oxfordshire bus 500 in Brackley, Oxfordshire. I was heading for Banbury, and then Daventry / Rugby. I wanted a Midlands Gold Day Rider, which is valid on Stagecoach services across “Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Coventry, Staffordshire & Worcestershire”, and is “also valid on Oxfordshire services (200, 500 [that’s what I had boarded] & S3)”.
ABOVE: Description of the Stagecoach Midlands Gold Day Rider’s availability, from the Stagecoach website
Not only had my driver never heard of this ticket, but it wasn’t on his machine. A case of Stagecoach Oxfordshire not communicating with Stagecoach Midlands? Presumably a ticket only available from a Midlands bus?
So plenty of good tickets out there, but, sadly, things will occasionally be spoilt when you try to buy something that drivers have never heard of before, that may or may not be loaded onto their machines…
And I still want to know why the South East Discovery Ticket costs 10p more from Stagecoach than it does from everyone else…
