London and Travelcard
 

I am traveling to London for a week in Feb.with my husband and my children (18,15, and 12). I plan on buying each of us a weekly Travelcard. My guide books say that we will need passport size photos to buy one, but I read online that photos are no longer necessary for the weekly travelcard. Is this true? Do we need passport size photos or not?

You no longer need the picture for the card. I was there in November and it was great to be able to buy the card without having to have the picture. Enjoy yourselves and London is such a great place to visit, the family will have a wonderful time. Halfpint

The rules for photocards can be found in this document:

<b>http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/fares-tickets/2005/downloads/tfl-fares-2005.pdf</b>

on pages 52 and following. The Family Travelcard is the best deal for your situation.

The guide books tend to take years to catch up with rules changes.

Keith

True, but I think you can rely on a TfL document titled <u>Fares and tickets 2 January 2005 until further notice</u> as authoritative.

sktutor, Your 15 and 12 year old will need a photo (for the photocard) for virtually any of the travelcards or tickets no matter which cost scheme you choose. Only adults don't require photos.

There are a number of ways to reduce the costs for the kids and the Family Travelcard (1 Day duration) is by far the most money saving of the lot. The 18 year old won't qualify tho.

The TFL document Robespierre cited is the best resource but it is so dense and convoluted, it makes my brain hurt trying to figure out the combinations. If budget isn't too tight, just get everyone a 7 day travelcard and be done with it. Life is too short.

Many will probably shout me down on this, but I've found in the last 12 months a noticeable marked improvement in the customer services of the staff on the underground. Many of the folks in those boothes will actually try to sell you the best ticket for your family. In fact, just before christmas, we were part of a rain sodden, bedragled bunch of about 20, waiting at Stanmore for the 0930 cheap deadline for travelpasses to arrive. The weather was awful, the guards said they felt sorry for everyone and let us on 15 minutes early. If you are very lucky you will occaisionally come across the wannabe comic-undergound guards who tell jokes over the tannoy on the commutes home - how times change.

Thanks for all the help. After looking through the official site, I see my youngest children (15 and 12) will need photos. What size photos do they need to be? Also, I was planning on getting travelcards for zone 1 only. If we happen to go somewhere in zone 2, can we just pay the difference and if so, how does one do this?

zones 1,2 go together...i.e. you cant get a zone 1 travel card.incidentally about this paying the difference, i bought a 1,2,3 zone card and later found i needed to travel to zone 4. i stopped at the last stop in zone 3 and asked to extend my card.i told my story to the guy at the counter &amp; he sold me a single ride ticket for &pound;2. Was this the cheapest option?

errata: its the day and 3 day travel card that has the zone 1,2 minimum, you can get the week card for zone 1 only.

You may consider buying in US if an American thru RailEurope, who charges $36 for a 7-day zone 1,2 London Visitors Travelcard, which is just like cards you buy there but has a coupon book that you'll probably find something worth a few pounds in and can be used anytime, no until 9:30am as some travelcards in London. TFL web site lists 2005 prices for 7 day travelcard at 21.40 pounds - at 1.88 $=1 pound this would be about $40 - for two you'd save about $8 by buying thru them - no big savings but you may actually find something in the accompanying coupon book worth more. Anyway, Raileurope does charge a $15 mailing fee so I'd go thru one of their agents who doesn't charge the $15, like Budget Europe (800-441-9413) who are also London travel experts.

The OP has a group of five - three adults and two children (for the purposes of Family Travelcards). The adult tariff is &pound;3.10 per day, and the children are &pound;.80 per day (free on weekends). Thus, the entire week will cost &pound;73.10, a marked saving from the &pound;107 for 5 Visitor Travelcards. You can buy the Family Travelcards at the first tube station you transit, thereby saving the postage and handling.

If you feel adventurous, you could save mucho &pound; by getting Weekly Bus Season Passes for &pound;41 for the lot of you. The bus system is easily understood - see the links on the London Superthread - and doesn't require the amount of walking and climbing that the Tube does.

I bought a 7-Day pass at the Heathrow Tube station for Zone 1 (and paid the difference from the airport to the station) and didn't need to have a photograph taken. I hope you all are in good health, because the tube has STAIRS in many places. On my next trip, I'm going to get a bus pass. It's cheaper, no stairs, and you get to see more of the city. The downside is possible traffic jams, and rain. I think the benefits outweigh the negative possibilities.

Family travel cards do reprent some savings, but it's a hassle to wit until 9:30 and purchase them every day; in this case, only the two younger kids would qualify for the child fare.

IMHO, the simplest thing would be to just buy 5 individual 7-day visitors travelcards (3 adult, 2 children's) and be done with it -- no wondering about whether you're straying into Zone 2 (which includes Greenwich and the Zoo) no questions about photos (not needed for visitors travelcards) and best of all no daily waiting and purchasing (as there would be with family travelcards). There might be ways to save a few pounds, but when you're on vacation convenience and not worrying are part of the equation, too.

Most attractions in London don't open until 9:00 or so anyway, so the fact that the Family Travelcard doesn't permit use of the tube and buses until 9:30 is moot. On Saturday and Sunday (<i>i.e.</i> 28% of the week), there is no time restriction.

It takes less than a minute to buy 5 tickets from a machine, and I have never encountered a line. I don't know anyone who wouldn't spend 7 minutes to make &pound;30.

The &pound;73.10 quoted above is for Zone 1-2 cards, so you don't have to worry about staying in Zone 1.

The photocards for the 12 &amp; 15yo take about 2 minutes to obtain. You can do the paperwork before you leave the US by printing out the application from

<b>http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/fares-tickets/2005/downloads/application-form-5-10-11-15.pdf</b>

The last time we went, we had the applications and pictures with us, and they didn't even want them.

Anonymous, Didn't you get the memo? Robespierre is always right. Always.

I am only awed by the magnitude of what I do <u>not</u> know.

3 adult 7-day visitors' travelcards @&pound;20.40 and 2 kids' @8.20 = &pound;77.60, not the $107 that Robespierre calculated (perhaps not aware of kids' rates?).

For a savings of (77.6 - 73.1=) &pound;4.50, the family can hit the road whenever they feel like it. If they find any use for the coupons and offers that come wth the visitors' cards so they might even come out ahead. I speak from personal experience, we did find ourselves waiting in lines for the family travelcards during our visit. The 9:30 start time is also a discount on the regular one-day travelcards, so people arriving at hte station in the 5 minutes or so before 9:30 would queue up to save a pound or two.

Er, &quot;savings of&quot; should read &quot;outlay of&quot;, sorry.

Being able to start the day an hour earlier, arriving at attractions when they open rather than an hour later, adds a significant number of hours to week-long trip.

The post 930 saving on a weekday is quite substantial. It about twice as expensive before 930.

I stand corrected. The saving <u>is</u> much smaller. I looked at ticket-on-line.com and they didn't have what we wanted, so I didn't notice the 7-day deal.

Would I buy one? Probably not. Some days we (3 adults and 2 teenagers) didn't use transport at all, some days we used bus passes only (before 9:30), and our first and last days we needed Zone 6. I just like the flexibility of going day-by-day.

Walter, an adult one-day pass for zones 1 and 2 costs &pound;4.70 before 9:30 AM and &pound;6.00 after -- that's about one-third more, not double, or roughly the cost of one ride. And we were talking about family travelcards, which are not available before 9:30 AM at any price.

A comment on a further tidbit of misinformation from an earlier post -- there is no postage and handling fee on the visitors travelcards when they are ordered directly from London Transport, via ticket-on-line.

My goodness, this entire thread has resulted frm a query about whether a guidebook was more current than online information!

Anonymous,

I think you've got your befores and afters mixed up

Another feature of the Visitor Travelcard from ticket-on-line.com is that you have to specify in advance what your dates of travel will be - no refunds if your flight is delayed. If your plans change, you have to return the unused tickets by international mail such that they arrive in Blighty before their valid date.

Also, if any ticket is lost or stolen, you have to buy a new one. The daily ones are cheaper than the weekly ones.

We frequently get day travelcards for use on the commuter train and local London transport (Tube, buses, etc.). What bugs me is that about 30% of the time, our travelcards aren't read properly by the machines at the Tube entrance turnstyles and we have to &quot;seek assistance&quot; to get in. These travelcards have been around for ages; can't they get the system to work right yet?

Huh. My family and I have put tickets into Tube machines <i>hundreds</i> of times, and never had a read failure. I remarked upon the reliability of the system at the time.

Maybe your coded strip is being corrupted - do you have a magnetic personality?

Robespierre, which commuter train station do you get your combination cards at?

Whats the best public transport/travelcard option for a week staying in Blackheath SE London.

Whats Blackheath like?

I've got them all over. From the agents at LHR and Lambeth North, from the machines at Kings Cross and Waterloo, and probably a few others.

Not the same thing as getting a combination commuter rail (Great Western Link, for example) and London transport card. So where do you get those failsafe combination cards? From Slough? Maidenhead? Burnham?

Sorry, I think we have a failure to communicate here.

You were talking about day travelcards when you began bemoaning the strip readers, so I thought that was the topic. I've never bought a commuter ticket.

Yes, Robespierre, you failed to read my first post correctly before responding. I WAS talking about a day travelcard...but you can also get them in combination with a commuter rail ticket. It's a single card good for the RT commuter ride AND London transport. It IS a type of daycard and we do have regular problems with it being read properly for the Tube entrances.

johnj, Blackheath is a pretty posh suburb, with plenty of access to open space, but bounded by busy main roads. There are lots of surrounding areas that would like to be thought Blackheath, but aren't, so you might need to use streetmap.co.uk to check out the exact address and its proximity to Blackheath and Greenwich Park.

As for travel from there, most people would be using the suburban trains running in to London Bridge, though some might change at Lewisham for the Docklands Light Railway, depending on where they work. It's in Zone 3 for Travelcard purposes, though I have no idea whether you get a better deal by restricting yourself to any deals offered by the train companies for trains only.

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/info/maps/connections.pdf
www.blackheath.org/

johnj:

In case it wasn't clear from Patrick's post, Travelcards give you unlimited travel on tubes, TFL-affiliated buses, trams and trains (apart from the Heathrow and, I think, Stansted Express) within their area. So a Z3 card covers the bus from your bit of Blackheath to the railway station, the railway journey to London Bridge and the onward tube.

The best deal is almost always to buy the card for the zones you'll be using, and buy a tube ticket from Heathrow, or a Southern Railways train ticket from Gatwick, to the beginning of the zone. It's worth checking on the tfl site whether it's cheaper in your currency to buy the travelcard before you leave your country. Families should always check out the Familycard for potentially outstanding value.

Incidentally I've been using these cards, freestanding, in conjuntion with commuter fares or as part of cross-London train journeys for over 30 years. I've bought them from TFL stations, from corner sweet shops, from BR stations, from Thames Trains stations (BTilke's suppliers), from Virgin, from Heathrow and Gatwick Express. From practically every transport company in the world apart from Uzbekistan Hava Yollari.

The only times any of the at least 3,000 cards I've bought has failed to work have been when I've put them in upside down.

This is a very helpful thread, and I'm taking notes. Question: we are staying in Bloomsbury and plan to go to the usual sights as well as spending one day in Oxford and the Cotswolds. Will be in London for 6 nights. Flying into Heathrow and leaving via Eurostar to Paris. Is the zones 1 &amp; 2 pass good for us? It's possible that just the day passes might make sense, given that we can walk to some things from Bloomsbury.

Also, is the pass that includes the Heathrow Express worth it? I gather there is also transport by the regular tube.

Sorry, FlannerUK, no, we're not putting them in upside down. And it's not just us. A group got on the train at Slough and got off at Paddington when we did. Several of their group had problems getting onto the Bakerloo line at Paddington. Interesting how you and Robespierre think alike--if it hasn't happened to you personally, then the people it has happened to must be doing something wrong.

Grr, I used the log in of a visiting visiting here to join us for the French Week exhibition. She didn't log out.

This thread is getting rancorous. I quit.

BTilke: This wouldn't explain a whole group of people having ticket problems. But I used to have this problem from time to time and then discovered that the travel cards can easily be erased by being in proximity to a magnet. I frequently use a handbag w/ a magnetic clasp and figured out that was my problem. Not just when the card was in the purse, but also when it was in my pocket and the handbag/clasp was riding on my hip next to that pocket.

So I am now careful where/what the travel cards are next to and haven't had any sort of problem since . . . . . . .

Flanner/Patrick
I've got the cricket team (party of 21) booked in at the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath from July 15 to July 22.
Good rate for multi share. This hotel is older than white settlement in oz!

I guess I should recommend they buy a Zone 3 travelcard for the week...to get to the tourist sites in the city.

I would think one day we will walk across thru greenwich and take the boat to westminster. Cheapest way on the ferry? (i hope it is just as exclusive as the scotland island ferry eh flanner)

We will be going to fixtures by coach.
Fastest route ex Blackheath to
Knebworth in herts?
Hampton in surrey?
Dulwich college?
Hambledon in Hants?

I know this is way off topic but....